category: Fiction

“A moving debut about love and loneliness” – Sunday Times

“A sublime coming-of-age tale… an extraordinarily composed and deeply felt debut – Guardian”

“Both a brutal and tender coming-of-age story, marking Ibeh as a major new literary voice.” – The i

“A magnificent debut…” – Daily Telegraph

“Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s writing has a certain delicacy to it, so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

An exquisite story of love and loneliness and coming of age that asks how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness.

When Obiefuna’s father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family’s apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and routine, devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.

Interweaving the perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, BLESSINGS is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.

Chukwuebuka Ibeh is a writer from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, born in 2000. His writing has appeared in McSweeneys, The New England Review of Books and Lolwe, amongst others, and he is a staff writer at Brittle Paper. He was the Runner-up for the 2021 J.F Powers Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the Gerald Kraak Award and Morland Foundation Scholarship and was profiled as one of the “Most Promising New Voices of Nigerian Fiction” in Electric Literature. He has studied creative writing under Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers and Tash Aw. He is a student on a fully funded MFA programme at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, until 2024.

The year is 1920. The place is a remote farmhouse in Provence, home to the reclusive painter Edouard Tartuffe and his niece, Ettie. Into this strange, silent house walks Joseph: a young journalist hoping to write an article about Tartuffe. But the more he entangles himself in the peculiar household, the more Joseph’s curiosity grows…

Ettie cooks and cleans for her uncle. She prepares his studio, scrubs his paintbrushes, and creates the perfect environment for him to work. She has never gone further than the local village. She is sharp-eyed and watchful. But beneath her cool exterior, Joseph senses something simmering. Ettie, Joseph and Tartuffe circle each other throughout the hot, crackling summer, until finally they collide.

Lucy Steeds is 29 years old and a graduate of both the Faber Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She began writing the novel while living in France and currently splits her time between London and Amsterdam. THE ARTIST has — in manuscript form — already been listed for the BPA First Novel Award, the Yeovil Literary Prize, the Page Turner Awards, the Fiction Factory First Chapter Competition, and was a Finalist in the Spotlight First Novel Award and the Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer Award. Lucy herself has synaesthesia and uses this to play with ways of translating images into words. She has a BA in English Literature and a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford.

Lucy is represented by Eleanor Birne at RCW Literary Agency.

When the odds are against you, it’s time to get even.

Matilda, Jo, Penny and Cressy are all women at the top of their game; so imagine their surprise when they start to be personally overlooked and professionally pushed aside by less-qualified men.

Only they’re not going down without a fight.

Society might think the women have passed their amuse-by dates but the Revenge Club have other plans.

After all, why go to bed angry when you could stay up and plot diabolical retribution? Let the games begin…

Kathy Lette first achieved success as a teenager with the novel Puberty Blues, which was made into a major film and a TV mini-series. After several years as a newspaper columnist and television sitcom writer for Columbia Pictures in America, she wrote numerous international bestsellers including Mad Cows (which was made into a film starring Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel), How to Kill Your Husband and Other Handy Household Hints (recently staged by the Victorian Opera, Australia), To Love, Honour and Betray and The Boy Who Fell To Earth (soon to be filmed by Emily Mortimer). Her novels have been published in seventeen languages around the world. Kathy appears regularly as a guest on the BBC and Sky News. She is also an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2004 she was the London Savoy Hotel’s Writer in Residence where a cocktail named after her can still be ordered. Kathy is an autodidact (a word she obviously taught herself) but in 2010, received an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University.

Kathy is represented for publishing by David Headley at DHH Literary Agency.

When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards.

The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.

When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog—to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.

Clare Pooley graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge and spent twenty years in the heady world of advertising before becoming a full-time writer. Clare’s ‘brutally honest and hilariously funny’ memoir, The Sober Diaries, has helped thousands of people worldwide to quit drinking. Her debut novel, The Authenticity Project, followed and was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick, a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of the RNA Debut Novel Award. It has been translated into 30 languages. The People on Platform 5 was published in 202l. Clare lives in Fulham, London with her long-suffering husband, three children, and two border terriers.

Clare is represented by Hayley Steed at Janklow and Nesbit.

To mark the thousandth year of peace in the Empire of Concordia, the emperor’s ship—the Dragon’s Dawn—embarks upon a twelve-day voyage.

Aboard are the illustrious heirs of the twelve provinces of Concordia, each graced with a unique magical ability known as a Blessing. Except one: Ganymedes Piscero—class clown, slacker, and all-round disappointment. If anyone finds out about his missing Blessing, his entire province will be cast out of the empire into the arid wastes beyond. Because if lone heir Ganymedes hasn’t inherited the Blessing, that means one of his forbidden bastard siblings has. But Ganymedes has a plan—offend the league of pretentious assholes enough to be expelled from it before his devastating secret is discovered.

However, Ganymedes is not the only passenger with devious intentions—when a beloved heir is murdered, all the remaining scions are suspects. Stuck at sea and surrounded by powerful people he’s purposefully pissed off, Ganymedes’ odds of survival are slim.

But as the bodies pile higher, he must become the hero he was not born to be and unmask the killer before he ends up the next victim of their bloody crusade.

Frances is a creative writing graduate from Royal Holloway University of London. As well as writing about imaginary events, she also writes about real ones for various publications, with subject matters ranging from Women in Ancient Greece to the US Civil Rights Movement. When she’s not writing, Frances can be found sewing costumes for comic conventions, or performing Shakespeare with her travelling theatre troupe. As a queer writer, Frances is passionate about bringing more LGBTQIA+ representation into fantasy. Frances is represented for publishing by Harry Illingworth at DHH Literary Agency.

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbours in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sera is the most recent arrival, having fled ecological devastation in Europe with her husband Adam and two-year-old Aliana. Janet has lived in the neighbourhood long enough to see the demographics change, but she’s never had refugee neighbours before, and isn’t sure how she feels about them. She lives alone until her adult son Conor returns unannounced, spending long hours holed up in Janet’s spare room online instead of finding a job. Single parent Keri has an uneasy friendship with her older neighbour, who likes to bring over produce from the garden and keep an eye what’s happening, but Keri can’t afford to say no to Janet’s gifts of food and she has her hands full with a teenager and a tearaway toddler. Her daughter, Wairere, is a strange and gifted child, always picking up on stuff that isn’t hers to worry about. And suddenly there’s a lot of stuff to worry about – people who have arrived in her world with terror either in their nightmares, in the pasts they’ve left behind, or, frighteningly, in the future they dream of.

Behind these characters is a narrator who runs through all their lives, under their homes, into their pasts and futures. Layers of history are never far from under the characters’ feet as they make their own small journeys and marks on the land. Though they cross paths with forebears unknowingly, the narrator sees the people who have gone before and the devastating change that has already been wrought on a place that was once entirely wetlands.

Tina Makereti writes novels, short fiction and creative non-fiction. Her debut story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia Publishers 2010)won the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Award for Fiction in 2011. In 2016 her story Black Milk won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Pacific Region. Her first novel, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage NZ, 2014) was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2016 and also won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction. In 2009 she was the recipient of the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing (non-fiction), and in the same year received the Pikihuia Award for Best Short Story Written in English. Tina’s second novel, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, is about a young Māori man who was exhibited in the Egyptian Hall in London in the 1840s. Film rights have been optioned by Piki Films, the producers of Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Tina has been writer in residence at Randall Cottage, Wellington, and Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt. She is of Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore and Pākehā descent.

89-year-old Margaret has lived on Garnon Crescent all her life, except for those few years she never talks about. She knows all the neighbours; their hopes, their heartbreaks.

Only recently, Margaret’s memory isn’t what it used to be. She is sure Barbara, her best friend and neighbour, told her something important. Something she was supposed to remember.

When Barbara is found dead, Margaret determines to recover her missing memory. She and her grandson James begin to investigate, but soon strange incidents occur in her home. Margaret’s daughter thinks her memory is getting worse, but Margaret knows somebody wants her out of the way.

Because Margaret holds the key to solving this crime. If only she could remember where she put it.

Richard Hooton was born and brought up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and studied English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton before becoming a journalist and communications officer. He has won prizes in numerous short story and flash fiction competitions and has been highly commended in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize and Cambridge Prize. Richard lives near Manchester. He is represented by Sam Copeland at RCW Literary Agency.