And What Can We Offer You Tonight

Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed tells the story of Jewel, an established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

PRAISE

“And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a deep dive into sacred revenge, a vivid, devastating and exquisite story of love and loyalty, among three friends who can ill afford such luxuries.”
—L.X. Beckett, author of Gamechanger and Dealbreaker

“Mohamed weaves a most beautiful and powerful spell with a thin crust of gorgeous prose and coy smiles barely hiding the powerful, growing rage beneath. Much like the dead, it’s a tale that keeps haunting long after the story ends.”
—Leigh Harlen, author of Queens of Noise

“Sometimes your own justice is the only kind you can get. Jewel lives in a future of luxury, spectacle, and wealth, but the rot doesn’t even bother to try to hide itself. Reveling in the disparity is the point, for the elite who come to the House of Bicchieri for the pleasure of doing anything they want. What follows after a client does just that is Jewel’s story to tell in the admiration-soaked narration of The Great Gatsby, if Gatsby rose from her coffin in her most elegant gown and avenged herself. And What Can We Offer You Tonight questions the notion that we must be better victims than the villains who don’t care how they hurt us—and then shows us how it feels when justice rings true.”
—C.L. Polk, author of The Midnight Bargain

“And What Can We Offer You Tonight is an alluring fever dream where magic, science and death all blur together. Mohamed’s prose begs you to lean in close to its whispered song before seizing you by the throat without remorse, and the only choice that is left is to surrender yourself to it once and for all.”
—Jordan Shiveley, Dread Singles

“...a moment of solace and resonance when the capitalist hellscape gets you down.”
—Elly Bangs, author of Unity

“A dazzling look at death, revenge and survival in a drowning future. Stunning from first word to last. I didn’t want it to end.”
— Eboni Dunbar, author of Stone and Steel

“And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a torrent of mercilessly poetic horror—bloody vengeance and cold apocalypse swept up in utterly gorgeous prose. Premee Mohamed will fascinate and repel you.”
— C.J. Lavigne, author of In Veritas

“Exquisitely grotesque.”
—Caitlin Starling, author of The Luminous Dead and Yellow Jessamine

“Moody and atmospheric, this dystopian novella from Mohamed (A Broken Darkness) skillfully turns a murder mystery into a scathing examination of what life might be like in even later stage capitalism.”
—Publishers Weekly

Written by Premee Mohamed
Cover illustration by Carly A-F

And What Can We Offer You Tonight is part of the 2021 Neon Hemlock Novella Series.