It's Nietzsche meets Dzogchen in a black leather corset.
Who says you can't have your smut with a side of smart?

The Series

Anamnesis

A dystopian romantasy about a girl deciding that she — and the people she loves — are not acceptable losses, set inside an institution that has spent centuries proving otherwise. A high-concept, character-driven thriller that might just make you think. At its heart: a girl with a snarky void-beast and exceptionally poor taste in men.

Ekpyrosis

Four quests. Four races against time. Four dysfunctional teams just trying to survive the Bleed. One extraordinary twist.

Palingenesis

Forthcoming

What's a goddess to do with her existence but imagine up amazing stories? But what happens when her characters start biting back?

The Drawing Board

A Single Spy

In Development

On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a young Will Shakespeare — broke, brilliant, and far too curious for his own good — is sent to sniff out a religious plot against the Crown. What he digs up is older, darker, and a great deal more occult than his spymasters bargained for. Turns out a poet was exactly the wrong man to send — and exactly the right one.

The Sarsen Gate

In Development

A clutch of eye-rolling teenagers, dragged to Avebury's stone circle for the summer solstice by their incense-burning, festival-loving families. One minute it's drum circles and questionable kaftans — the next, the stones have yanked them four and a half thousand years back, to the people raising them by hand. Getting home means understanding why the gate was built at all, and what it was meant to keep out.

What You're Walking Into

It's Nietzsche in a corset. It's philosophy with teeth.

The Chosen One, inverted so completely the heroine is the source of the world's suffering — not its salvation.

Devotion that survives six hundred years of death and forgetting — beautiful, or a kind of captivity?

Felicity Van Rysbergen

Melbourne-based writer with a PhD in English and Cultural Studies. I've spent years studying how stories lodge in us — how narrative rewires the way we think about power, memory, identity, and what we're willing to burn for. I've lectured at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe, sit on the advisory board of Deakin University's Masters in Creative Writing, and learned the most important thing about writing at a Sydney PR firm: every word either earns its place or costs you the reader.

The Anamnesis Trilogy is my debut — a dark romantasy that asks what happens when you discover you've been living the same life for six hundred years, and the system keeping you asleep was built with your own hands. It's built for the reader who finishes at 3am and immediately goes back to chapter one.

When I'm not writing, I'm reading too many books at once, arguing about whether Heraclitus was an optimist, and being aggressively supervised by two doodles who have strong opinions about my writing hours and zero interest in my deadlines.

Notes from the desk