Guest post written by For No Mortal Creature author Keshe Chow
Keshe was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and migrated to Australia when she was two years old. She currently lives in Naarm (Melbourne) with her husband, two kids, and an ice cream-obsessed cat named Wasabi. She won the 2020 Perito Prize, the 2021 Yarra Literature Prize, the 2021 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction, the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript, and the 2023 Uncharted Magazine Thrilling Contest. Her debut young adult fantasy novel, THE GIRL WITH NO REFLECTION, was an instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller.
About For No Mortal Creature: In this romantic, lush fantasy inspired by Wuthering Heights, a girl with the power to move between life and death must travel into the afterlife to save her grandmother. But to survive she’ll have to rely on her mortal enemy, as well as the ghost of the boy who once betrayed her. OUT NOW.
Love it or loathe it, the recent trailer for Emerald Fennel’s upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation definitely set tongues wagging. The film itself, which features Australian stars Margot Robbie as Cathy Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as the infamous Heathcliff, is described on IMDb as an exploration of the “intense and destructive relationship” between the two. Certainly the sneak peek seems to channel the wild, chaotic sensuality that churns unsettlingly beneath the surface of the original Brontë novel. However, critics of the casting have pointed out that choosing 35-year-old blonde Robbie to play what is canonically a dark-haired teenager, and Elordi to play what many scholars believe is a person of colour, is problematic. Regardless of personal opinion, the film, which is set to release in February 2026, will almost certainly be a loose and fast interpretation of the source material.
Wuthering Heights has long served as inspiration for other art forms, and books are no exception. For me, personally, the novel has shaped my own relationship with gothic and classic fiction over my lifetime. Its rawness, brutality, depictions of classism and racism, and portrayals of intergenerational trauma, left a deep impression on me as a teenager reading it for the very first time. And upon each re-read (and there have been many!) this work sinks its hooks into me even deeper – much like the lifelong obsession Heathcliff has for Cathy.
This is why, when it came to write my upcoming gothic Young Adult novel For No Mortal Creature, I used Wuthering Heights as one of my key inspirations.
If you’re like me, and you’re a little bit Wuthering Heights obsessed too, then here are some books to feed your addiction…
What Souls Are Made Of by Tasha Suri
This 2022 Young Adult retelling of Wuthering Heights is part of the Remixed Classics series, where authors from marginalised backgrounds reinterpret classic works through their own cultural lenses to subvert the overwhelming cishet, white, and male conventions of classic literature. In this retelling, Tasha Suri, an award-winning fantasy author, casts Heathcliff as the abandoned son of a lascar – an Indian sailor, which ironically is closer to canon than Jacob Elordi is. Catherine herself is reimagined as a British Indian teenager who is struggling with her own relationship between love and duty.
Ruthless Devotion by Rebecca Kenney
In this dark, spicy retelling of Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Heathcliff find each other in a small cult community. In this book, Cathy Earnshaw has a secret: she can sense death. And Heathcliff, who was stolen as a child and raised by necromancers, has secrets of his own. As the two embark on a romance at once violent and tender, they are forced to reckon with a community – and a world – that’s determined to keep them apart. Described as a Southern Gothic retelling with a magical, fantastical twist, this book is the third book in the Gilded Monsters series of interconnected standalones and sits firmly within the New Adult age category.
For No Mortal Creature by Keshe Chow
My own book, a gothic Young Adult novel that released on the 7th of October, is set in a world where ghosts can die and become ghosts of ghosts – and no one knows how deep the afterlife truly goes. Jia Yi must delve through the many layers of the death realm in order to save her grandmother. In order to survive, she must rely on her two mortal (and immortal enemies): the ghost of Lin, the boy who once betrayed her; and the cold, aloof Essien Lancaster, prince of a rival kingdom. Brimming with romance, atmosphere, and Chinese superstitions, it’s like Inception crossed with Wuthering Heights, but with ghosts.
The Favorites by Layne Fargo
From the moors of Northern England to the ice rinks, this contemporary retelling of Wuthering Heights was released in January 2025 and immediately took the world by storm. This novel follows Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha as they navigate, as teens, the cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing, until a shocking incident at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games brings their partnership to an abrupt end. Set ten years after the fact, alternating between narrative text and clips from a fictional 2024 documentary, The Favorites transplants the savage, toxic love between Cathy and Heathcliff into a thoroughly modern setting.
Heathcliff by Karina Halle
While there aren’t many details about book, since it’s not due to come out until next year, it’s described as being a Gothic vampire romantasy retelling of Wuthering Heights; Halle suggests that Heathcliff himself will be portrayed in “all his broody glory”.
