category: Fiction

Small Joys

SMALL JOYS is an extraordinary debut that has been described as Sally Rooney’s NORMAL PEOPLE meets Dolly Alderton’s GHOSTS. It featured in the Bookseller as Editor’s choice, and was pre-empted by Scribner in the UK and Ballantine in the US for publication in March 2023 – you can read the announcement here. SMALL JOYS charts the evolving friendship between Harley, a Black, gay, working-class young man dealing with mental health issues, and his flatmate Muddy – who changes his life forever.

It’s 2005 in Kent and Harley is a triple threat: black, gay, and working class. Oh, and he’s just dropped out of University, after lying to his estranged dad and claiming that he was training to become a Chemical Engineer. Moving back in with his friend Chelsea, and in the midst of an unfulfilling affair with an older white man (who may or may not be a racist), he’s feeling lost. But when his attempt to finally end things is disturbed by his flatmate, Muddy, his perspective on life changes. Muddy is everything Harley isn’t: confident in his masculinity, ostensibly heterosexual, and warm and uncomplicated. Slowly their friendship blossoms as Muddy introduces Harley to things he loves – birdwatching, rugby, Oasis – and Harley starts to wonder if there is a future for him after all. In turns a moving depiction of mental health, queerness, and intersectionality as well as a laugh-out-loud funny keenly observed exploration of growing up and learning who you are.

Elvin James Mensah is a 27-year-old British-Ghanaian writer born and raised in South East London. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and Journalism from Bournemouth University, where he began writing his first novel. When not writing about blackness and queerness, he can be found voraciously explaining either the interconnectivity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to his long-suffering friends, or the everlasting cultural impact of the Spice Girls. His other hobbies include drinking copious amounts of Capri Sun and re-reading Donna Tartt and Hanya Yanigihara novels. Elvin is represented by Juliet Mushens at Mushens Entertainment, and SMALL JOYS will be published by Scribner in the UK as a lead title in March 2023.

I’m Sorry You Feel That Way

*This title is currently under option*

I’M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY is a stiletto-sharp story of sibling misunderstandings, grappling with complex family dynamics, mental health, and the intricacies of sibling relationships. You can check out the announcement in the Bookseller here; it also featured in a Cosmopolitan article as a new release to look out for in 2022.

For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide and conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is their older brother Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with. There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything.

As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they’d intended. They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down. And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.

Rebecca graduated from Oxford University in 2010 with a first-class degree in English. She’s been writing since she was a child and has won numerous prizes for short stories and plays. She is the author of three novels, including Our Fathers (rivverun), which has been selected as a Waterstones paperback of the year for 2021 as well as The View on the Way Down and The Followers, both published by Picador.

Rebecca is represented by Caroline Hardman from Hardman and Swainson, and I’M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY will be published by riverrun on 8th July 2022.

Salt Lick

SALT LICK by Lulu Allison is a bold, undaunted and richly imagined vision of an England filled with deserted countryside, and people both seeking the truth and fleeing from it. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

Britain is awash, the sea creeps into the land, brambles and forest swamp derelict towns. Food production has moved overseas and people are forced to move to the cities for work. The countryside is empty. A chorus, the herd voice of feral cows, wander this newly wild land watching over changing times, speaking with love and exasperation.

Jesse and his puppy Mister Maliks roam the woods until his family are forced to leave for London. Lee runs from the terrible restrictions of the White Town where he grew up. Isolde leaves London on foot, walking the abandoned A12 in search of the truth about her mother.

Lulu Allison grew up in a small village in the Chilterns. She came to writing accidentally whilst undertaking what she thought was an art project, unexpectedly discovering what she should have been doing all along. That art project became her first novel, Twice the Speed of Dark, published by Unbound in 2017. Salt Lick is her second novel, and she is working on a third, inspired by the Thomas Mann novel, Doctor Faustus. She lives in Brighton.

Bad Fruit

BAD FRUIT is an unforgettable portrayal of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, and a young woman’s search for truth and liberation. It was snapped up by HarperFiction in a five-way auction – you can read more about it in the Bookseller here.  It will appeal to fans of MY DARK VANESSA and Celeste Ng.

Just graduated from high school and waiting to start college at Oxford, Lily lives under the scrutiny of her volatile Singaporean mother, May, and is unable to find kinship with her elusive British father, Charlie. When May suspects that Charlie is having an affair, there’s only one thing that calms May down: a glass of perfectly spoiled orange juice served by Lily, who must always taste it first to make sure it’s just right.

As her mother becomes increasingly unhinged, Lily starts to have flashbacks that she knows aren’t her own. Over a sweltering London summer, all semblance of civility and propriety is lost, as Lily begins to unravel the harrowing history that has always cast a shadow on her mother. The horrifying secrets she uncovers will shake her family to its core, culminating in a shattering revelation that will finally set Lily free.

Beautiful and shocking, BAD FRUIT is as compulsive as it is thought-provoking, as nuanced as it is explosive. A masterful exploration of mothers and daughters, inherited trauma and the race to break its devastating cycle, BAD FRUIT will leave readers breathlessly questioning their own notions of femininity, race and redemption.

King was born to first-generation Singaporean parents and grew up in London. A graduate of Faber Academy’s “Writing A Novel” course, she came third in the Aurora Prize for Short Fiction 2019 and won the Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize 2019. Currently she works as a corporate lawyer in London and volunteers at anti-human trafficking and domestic violence charities. She is represented by Hellie Ogden at Janklow and Nesbitt, and BAD FRUIT will be published by HarperFiction on 18th August 2022. Penguin Randomhouse will publish in the US on August 23rd 2022.

Praise for BAD FRUIT 

“Ella King opens up the fraught space between mother and daughter to reveal both the unbearable weight of inherited traumas as well as the uncontainable desire of a heart reaching for life. Bad Fruit cuts away the skin of a family as if a daughter could be a knife slicing through lies, pain, and fear. The heart hidden beneath all the secrets is sweet. The heart hidden beneath the secrets is hers. Breathtaking.” – Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and The Chronology of Water

“Beautiful, disturbing, impossible to put down. Bad Fruit heralds a seriously impressive new talent in Ella King.” – Chris Whitaker, bestselling author of We Begin At The End

“A compelling debut that fizzes with tension from start to finish, blending the subtle erudition of literary fiction with the drama and suspense of the very best thrillers. Masterful in its evocation of the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, this is a darkly fascinating, tightly plotted narrative from a writer to watch.” —Harper’s Bazaar (UK)

“Bad Fruit is at once a beautiful and harrowing novel which explores family dynamics, and tracks a journey of self-discovery. I am blown away by Ella’s talent for writing not only wonderful prose but complex and intriguing characters.” — L.V. Matthews, author of The Prank

“Bad Fruit is a beautiful collision of mothers and daughters, human darkness and human kindness, truth and lies, remembering and forgetting, trauma and healing.” —Sarah May, author of Becky

The Dance Tree

THE DANCE TREE is set in an era of superstition, hysteria, and extraordinary change, and inspired by true events of a doomed summer. THE DANCE TREE is an impassioned story of forbidden love, family secrets and women pushed to the edge.

In Strasbourg, in the boiling hot summer of 1518, a plague strikes the women of the city. First it is just one – a lone figure, dancing in the main square – but she is joined by more and more and the city authorities declare an emergency. Musicians will be brought in. The devil will be danced out of these women.

Just beyond the city’s limits, pregnant Lisbet lives with her mother-in-law and husband, tending the bees that are their livelihood. Her best friend Ida visits regularly and Lisbet is so looking forward to sharing life and motherhood with her. And then, just as the first woman begins to dance in the city, Lisbet’s sister-in-law Nethe returns from six years’ penance in the mountains for an unknown crime. No one – not even Ida – will tell Lisbet what Nethe did all those years ago, and Nethe herself will not speak a word about it.

It is the beginning of a few weeks that will change everything for Lisbet – her understanding of what it is to love and be loved, and her determination to survive at all costs for the baby she is carrying. Lisbet and Nethe and Ida soon find themselves pushing at the boundaries of their existence – but they’re dancing to a dangerous tune…

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is the author of eight novels for children and adults. Her books for children include the award-winning The Girl of Ink & Stars, A Secret of Birds & Bone, and Julia and the Shark. Her novels for adults are the Sunday Times-bestselling The Mercies, and The Dance Tree (Picador). Between them, her books have won numerous awards including a Betty Trask Award, Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Historical Association Young Quills Award, Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year, and the Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Year. They have been long- or shortlisted for the Prix Femina, the Jhalak Prize, the CILIP Carnegie Award, the Branford Boase Award, the Blue Peter Best Story Award, Costa Children’s Book Prize, and Foyles’ Book of the Year, amongst others.

Kiran’s novel THE MERCIES is currently in development with New Pictures. Kiran is represented by Hellie Ogden and Janklow and Nesbitt, and THE DANCE TREE will be published by Pan Macmillan on 12th May 2022.

Five Survive

FIVE SURVIVE is a US-based YA thriller set in real-time, as 6 friends travel across the states in an RV for Spring Break. And yes, you guessed it … only five survive. Have you been watching YELLOWJACKETS? It will be published in US by Delacorte Press in November 2022; UK rights are with Farshore at Harper Collins, with a publication date to be announced soon.

FIVE SURVIVE begins at 10:00 p.m. It follows a group of six friends as they travel across the states in an RV for Spring Break. But when one of their tires blows out on a remote, dirt road, the group soon realize that there is a sniper out there in the dark, shooting at them. They are trapped. A game of cat-and-mouse plays out across eight hours as the group desperately tries to escape, and to figure out which one of them is the target. Buried secrets are forced to light in the cramped, claustrophobic setting of the RV, and tensions within the group will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night. 

Holly Jackson’s first novel, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, has become the UK’s bestselling YA and children’s debut of 2019 and is a #1 New York Times bestseller. It has won the National Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year in 2020, Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year, longlisted for the Branford Boase, and was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year. It was an Observer Book of the Year and WH Smith Thumping Good Read. It was published in the UK and in the US and has been translated in many other languages around the world. An adaptation has recently been green-lit and is being produced by Moonage Pictures. Holly is represented by Sam Copeland at RCW Literary Agency.

Stepping Up

Stepping Up is the first fiction novel by Sunday Times bestselling author of The Unmumsy Mum, Sarah Turner. It follows the story of flighty Beth, who finds herself guardian to her teenage niece and toddler nephew after a family tragedy. It was scooped up by Transworld as a ‘major debut’ in a six-figure, two-book deal.

He’s quit more jobs and relationships than she can remember and she still sleeps in her childhood bedroom. It’s not that she hasn’t tried to grow up, it’s just that so far, the only commitment she’s held down is Friday drinks at the village pub.

Then, in the space of a morning, her world changes.

An unspeakable tragedy turns Beth’s life upside down, and she finds herself guardian to her teenage niece and toddler nephew, catapulted into an unfamiliar world of bedtime stories, parents’ evenings and cuddly elephants. Having never been responsible for anyone – or anything – it’s not long before she feels seriously out of her depth.

What if she’s simply not up to the job?

With a little help from her best friend Jory (purely platonic, of course …) and her lovely, lonely next-door neighbour, Albert, Beth is determined that this time she’s not giving up. It’s time to step up. This is a story about digging deep for strength you never knew you had and finding magic in things that were there all along.

Sarah Turner lives in Devon with her husband and their three boys. She started writing as The Unmumsy Mum in 2013, vowing to document her ‘warts and all’ account of parenting. Having previously written purely as a hobby, the success of her blog page and subsequent Facebook page prompted Sarah to consider writing more professionally. When not wrestling three small people (or blogging about them), Sarah’s guilty pleasures are reality TV shows and endless cups of tea, usually drunk tepid following interruptions from her children. You can follow Sarah’s everyday parenting rambles on Twitter.

Sarah is represented by Hannah Ferguson at Hardman & Swainson, and Stepping Up was published by Transworld on 17th March 2022.

Briefly, A Delicious Life

Briefly, A Delicious Life tells the story of Frederic Chopin, George Sand and a mischievous teenage ghost Blanca. It is a novel about convention and breaking convention, about love – secret, forbidden, unrequited, about art and creativity, men and women and the violence they mete out to one another. You can read more about this fascinating title in the bookseller here.

In 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days.

Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over three hundred years. Blanca’s was a life cut short and she is outraged. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of ‘beautiful men’, she has found that in death it is the women she falls for, their beauty she cannot turn away from, and it is the women and girls who, over her centuries in the village and at the monastery, she has sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man’s clothes, and Blanca is in love.

But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as winter sets in, as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster . . .

Nell Stevens lives in London, where she lectures in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University. She has a PhD in Victorian literature from King’s College London, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. Her debut book Bleaker House was published in 2017 by Picador. It is part memoir, part travelogue and part story collection, exploring the narrow spaces between real life and fiction. Nell is represented by Rebecca Carter at Janklow and Nesbitt, and Briefly, A Delicious Life will be published by Picador in June 2022.

Bite Risk

*This title is currently under option*.

Reminiscent of An American Werewolf in London and Stranger Things, BITE RISK is a slick thrill ride in a fascinatingly contained setting – with a pacy, filmic plot and loveable central characters. We already have strong interest in this title, which will be published in June 2023.  Sophie is planning more books set in the world of BITE RISK.

Children all over the world know the routine on a full moon: do your homework, tidy your room, check your perimeter traps, put your parents in their cages. No biggie – it’s the way things have been for more than twenty years. Life goes on. It’s normal. Boring, in fact. 

Thirteen-year-old Sel lives with his mum in the isolated community of Timorglade, sheltered from the worst of the world’s problems by sheer remoteness. For him, Confinement nights mean freedom – roaming the streets with his friends on their bikes, tranquillizer guns slung casually over their shoulders in case of emergencies that never happen. But this quiet life begins to unravel. Birds fall from the sky, ordinary incidents take on a sinister tone and, most alarmingly, security measures fall apart, leading to the unthinkable: escapes. It seems there’s more to their little town than they thought. As Sel and his friends try to figure out exactly why things are the way they are in Timorglade, they are frustrated at every turn – almost as though their every move is known, and being manipulated. When a tragedy occurs, it’s clear that the truth is being covered up.

Someone is lying to them. But it can’t be everyone, can it?

Sophie grew up in Chelmsford, Essex. She failed the 11+, had a weekend job at a boarding kennels where she suffered workplace bullying from a goat, and nurtured a dream to have a career she could do in her pyjamas. She worked at two London publishers before finally achieving her ambition by going freelance in 2003. Sophie lives on the edge of south-east London with her family and is author of The Orphans of St Halibut’s and Pamela’s Revenge, both illustrated by David Tazzyman.

Sophie is represented by Kate Shaw at The Shaw Agency. Bite Risk will be published by Simon & Schuster in June 2023.

The Raptures

THE RAPTURES explores how tragedy can unite a small community – and tear it apart – with the extraordinary resilience of a young girl at its heart.

It is late June in Ballylack. Hannah Adger anticipates eight long weeks’ reprieve from school, but when her classmate Ross succumbs to a violent and mysterious illness, it marks the beginning of a summer like no other. As others fall ill, questions about what – or who – is responsible pitch the village into conflict and fearful disarray. Hannah is haunted by guilt as she remains healthy while her friends are struck down. Isolated and afraid, she prays for help. Elsewhere in the village, tempers simmer, panic escalates and long-buried secrets threaten to emerge.

As the world crumbles around her, she must find the courage to be different in a place where conforming feels like the only option available.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Price for Literary for Ireland in 2019, and her short stories have been shortlisted for the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize, the BBC National Short Story Prize, An Post Irish Short Story of the Year Award, and in 2016 won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. The Fire Starters is in development with Element Pictures. The Raptures is her third novel and was published by Doubleday in January 2022. Jan is represented by Kate Johnson at Wolf Literary Services.

*Currently under option*