SILVA: A Graphic Novella (PRE-ORDER NOW!)

SILVA is a forthcoming Graphic Novella for adults from writer and illustrator P. J. Wood. PRE-ORDERS for the Signed First Edition are now open! This book will be printed and shipped in August 2026.

A queer graphic autofiction, a lost folklore archive, and a deck of forgotten stories…

Jordan Matthews thought he knew how his future would turn out.

A published author, illustrator, screenwriter, and PhD researcher, he imagined a life telling stories that meant something to people.

Instead, he finds himself broke, overweight, medicated, exhausted, and increasingly convinced that the world has moved on without him. His latest book has been rejected and his screenwriting career has imploded. Given one year to make some form of self-employment work or abandon his creative career entirely, Jordan takes a gamble and opens a tiny tarot parlour across the street from his social housing block in Cornwall.

Then he discovers a strange box buried in the archives of his university library...

Among its contents is a centuries-old, weathered penny broadside describing the trial of “Silva the Strange”, a bard accused of storytelling, shapeshifting, and illegal divination in a forgotten kingdom called Imperion. The story is incomplete. The verdict is missing. All that remains are fragments: fairy tales, symbols, cards, and clues.

As Jordan becomes obsessed with the mystery, the forgotten stories begin to transform how he understands folklore, identity, creativity, divination, and his own life. What starts as academic research gradually becomes something stranger: a symbolic system built from over thirty queer fairy tales hidden throughout history.

Part graphic memoir, part folklore anthology, and part cartomantic grimoire, SILVA is a story about failure, reinvention, reconstruction, resilience, and the search for meaning in uncertain times.

A love story about finding something to love rather than someone in mid-life somehow, SILVA is a tale for adult readers of graphic novels, folklore and fairy tales, tarot, and queer storytelling, and asks a simple question:

If the world never gives you the future you imagined, who do you become instead?

PRE-ORDER NOW. SHIPPING AUGUST 2026.

Each Pre-Order Includes:

• A Signed First Edition 
• A Full Bibliography and Motif Index of Folklore Sources
• A Special Mystery Gift!