I’m delighted to reveal the US cover of Hunger and Thirst which will be published by Tin House, an imprint of Zando, on 2nd June 2026. I love it so much: the boldness of the yellow font, the sculpture (the main character in the book is a sculptor), and the flies… I won’t tell you how the flies come into it; you’ll have to read it find out.
Yesterday, CrimeReads revealed the cover on their website, together with a piece I wrote about why this is the perfect cover – designed by Beth Steidle – for Hunger and Thirst.
They also published an excerpt from the beginning of the book, so if you’d like a taster before you pre-order, you can read it here.
And if you’re in the US here’s a list of places that you can pre-order it from, or of course you local independent bookstore.
For those in the UK and Canada, you’ll have to wait a little longer to see these covers. But let me know what you think of this one!
About the book 1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job delivering mail at a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist this hodgepodge family. But as Sue’s behavior and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. And, for this, Ursula finds herself literally haunted.
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker, Emma Zahini who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without.
I have only lived in two places that were difficult to inhabit but both are still very vivid. The first was when I was six, and my family lived in a static caravan (or trailer in the US) for six months. I can’t claim that we were living there because of any kind of hardship, but I clearly remember the ice on the insides of the windows in the mornings, having to wash at the sink with freezing water, and a very particular smell of damp cardboard walls. The second place was a squat when I was an art student. Living there was my choice, although money was tight. This house was damp too: a 1950s bungalow with no central heating and single-pane windows. It sat in the middle of an overgrown garden, isolated, despite being near the centre of town. One of my clearest memories from that time is being told about how one night before I arrived someone outside – an unidentified stranger – moved around the perimeter of the house tapping on each of the windows in the dark.*
I am still drawn to places that don’t welcome humans; places where people have once lived and now have left. I am curious about the objects they leave behind, and the bare minimum a person needs in order to make a house a home. Or, sometimes, the maximum.
In my fourth novel, Unsettled Ground, the main characters Jeanie and Julius live in what might appear to be an idyllic home: an English thatched cottage. But the reality is very different to the vision. There are mice in the thatch and holes in the ceilings which let the rain in. When Jeanie’s and Julius’s electricity goes off they have to use oil lamps and candles, and cook on an old range. They have no central heating and an outside toilet. And the next place they try to make home is a dilapidated caravan on a piece of wasteland. But they are resourceful people and make the best of what they’ve got.
What about you? What kind of place could you tolerate if you had to? Could you make a home out of other people’s junk? Could you live in an office?
Here are seven novels I love with houses that most of us might consider uninhabitable:
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Cassandra lives in a crumbling castle with her father, sister and stepmother. At some times of the day, especially in a dusky kind of afternoon light when it can’t be seen properly, the castle appears romantic and beautiful. But in her diary Cassandra wittily records the reality of the place: the icy draughts, how her father has sold off most of the furniture, the smelly, muddy moat and how she has to take a hot brick to bed so as to keep warm at night.
The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez, translated by Nick Caistor
A Cambridge academic is killed by a car while walking and reading Emily Dickinson. Her successor receives a book intended for his late colleague which is covered in cement, and intrigued, he travels to Uruguay and eventually to a remote and desolate beach. There he finds a ruined house made of books. Whose crazy idea was that, anyway? “What remained of the walls were bowed, jagged fragments, and in among the clumps of cement, tiny seashells, and dark lichens, I could make out pages of books baked in the sun then soaked, glued together like cuttlefish beaks, the type bleached and illegible.”
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
In this book of a dozen short stories, there’s just one with a house I wouldn’t want to live in, but a year after reading it, the place is still in my head. In Back of Beyond, Parson a pawnbroker, goes out to his brother’s place because he knows that his nephew, Danny, has been selling stolen items to fund his meths habit. But it’s not until Parson gets there that he discovers his brother and sister-in-law huddling in a freezing trailer and Danny living in the family home: “The room had been stripped of anything that could be sold, the only furnishing left a couch pulled up by the fireplace. Even wallpaper had been torn off a wall. The odour of meth infiltrated everything, coated the walls and floor.”
Resin by Ane Riel translated by Charlotte Barslund
Jens Horder is literally a hoarder – his house and outside yard is filled with stuff, so that it is almost impossible to move safely between the piles. Jens reports to the authorities that his six-year-old daughter, Liv is missing presumed dead, even while he knows she is hiding in a container in his yard. Liv sometimes goes inside the house to visit her bed-bound mother who has also become part of the junk and mess: “Shiny blue-green flies buzzed around open cans. Faded butterflies bashed their brown wings against the windowpanes somewhere behind all the stuff…. Small mice and much bigger mice with very long tails. Something was always scratching, grunting or squeaking somewhere. At times it would be Mum.”
Severance by Ling Ma
After a virus wipes out much of the world’s population, Candace, alone in New York but feeling she should still go to work, moves into her company’s office on the 31st floor of a skyscraper. She takes food from the employee’s vending machine and smashes her way into her boss’s office to sleep on his Mies van der Rohe sofa. It almost sounds idyllic: she sees a horse trot down Broadway and the stars in the night sky for the first time … if it weren’t of course for the plague and being all alone.
Stig of the Dump by Clive King
One day at the end of his grandmother’s garden, Barney falls into a disused chalk pit where he meets Stig, a caveman. Stig, well ahead of his time (this children’s novel was first published in 1963) reuses old junk to make his ‘cave’ house. “There were stones and bones, fossils and bottles, skins and tins, stacks of sticks and hanks of string.” Stig of the Dump is one of my earliest memories of owning a book, and I still have a copy.
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
Sixteen-year-old Franklin doesn’t really know his father Eldon, but when he is called to visit the dying man, and ultimately help him make a final journey to the backcountry, he goes. Eldon is living in the most evocatively described flophouse. “Clothes had been flung and were scattered every which way along with empty fast-food boxes and old newspapers… the hot plate was crusted with grease and dribbles, and a coffee can overflowed with butts and ashes and a few jelly jars stuffed full of the same.” A place not even Eldon wants to die in.
* This story became one of the inspirations for my sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst (which features this bungalow, uninhabitable for reasons you’ll have to read the book to find out) which will be published in the US in June 2026, and in the UK in May. Both available to pre-order now.
Calling all readers in Bath and beyond! On 7th October I’ll be at Mr B’s Emporium to interview Andrev Walden, the author of Bloody Awful In Different Ways. I loved this book.
This is what I had to say about it when I first read it:
Bloody Awful in Different Ways by Andrev Walden is so good. It’s already on my top ten reads of the year and I can’t imagine it getting bumped. Starting in 1983 seven-year-old Andrev has seven ‘dads’ in seven years, beginning with the one he thought was his biological father who turns out not to be, we meet all of the men that Andrev’s mother dates or moves in with, or move in with her. None of them seem to want Andrev or his half-siblings around. There is domestic violence but there is also humour, and my goodness Andrev Walden (an acclaimed Swedish journalist) can write. Andrev has told me on Instagram that even though it’s called a novel, it’s ‘a very true story’, and it certainly reads like one. Translated from Swedish by Ian Giles. Darkly funny, and comically tragic. An absolute gem. I loved it. Highly recommended.
This is what Mr B’s Emporium has to say:
Already a phenomenal international bestseller with a film adaptation in the works, Bloody Awful in Different Ways won the the 2023 August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award. This vivid and joyful novel follows a young boy who has seven fathers in seven years, and has already been loved by our bookseller Sue, who describes it as ‘poignant, funny and bloody brilliant in every way.’
And a bit about Andrev:
Andrev Walden is an acclaimed Swedish journalist and columnist who has worked for Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. In 2017, he became the first columnist to be nominated for the Swedish Grand Prize for journalism, praised for his ability to ‘find the everyday drama in the big questions’, and to make us ‘laugh and see the world, the family and ourselves in a new and slightly wiser light’. He lives in Stockholm.
The version I have of The River has a preface written by Godden, which I read before I started the novel, and I think if I hadn’t of read it, I might have given the book five stars. Why didn’t the publisher put it at the end! In the preface Godden gives away the big thing that happens, and I think I would have had all the feelings if I hadn’t of known it was coming. Very frustrating. Still, it is a wonderful coming of age story about a girl and her siblings in colonial India. It reminded me very much of Barbara Comyns, but less strange. Highly recommended, just don’t read the preface.
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In these twelve short stories, Curtis Sittenfeld doesn’t so much pin contemporary middle-aged women, as let them fly. There were some I’d read before in a previous very very short collection, but they definitely were worth reading again: Show Don’t Tell, and White Women LOL especially. The things the (mostly) women have to deal with are funny, awkward, sad, and joyful. All of life, I suppose, but written with such a wonderful ear for humanity. Highly recommended.
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Buy Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld from Bookshop.org.
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Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight has a complicated, fascinating and unusual structure. As well as being about a fictional couple – Kurt and Maggie – it is about the narrator’s (who is, I’m assuming, Nordenhof) investigation into insurance scam around the fire onboard a ferry called The Scandinavian Star in the 1990s, when 159 people died. Kurt invests in the company that buys the ferry, and as well as learning all this, and having the narrator / Nordenhof interact with her characters, we get Kurt’s and Maggie’s backstory – which made me feel much more sympathetic towards the difficult characters they have both become in their adult lives. See? Complicated. But it really worked for me. I got Kurt and Maggie. The characterisation is wonderful, the true-crime element surprising, the narrator / Nordenhof’s interruptions really interesting. And there are apparently another seven in the series.
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Buy Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof from Bookshop.org.
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Most of you will probably know Samantha Harvey from her Booker Prize-winning novel, Orbital, even if you have read it yet. I’ve read all four of her novels and her non-fiction book about insomnia, and I recommend them all, including The Wilderness, her debut.
Beautiful, tragic, moving. The Wilderness really deserves to be better known. The book starts as Jake, in his sixties, has a trip in a plane given as a present by his adult son, Henry. Jake’s plane flies over the prison where Henry is incarcerated. Four years later, at the end of the novel, when Henry has been released, the two men, and Jake’s girlfriend / carer look through a book of photographs. In between these two events we see, feel, experience, the unravelling of Jake’s mind as Alzheimer’s takes hold. We learn about Jake’s life with his parents, his birth, his affair, his marriage, the birth of his children and his tragedies in a series of spirals that change and fracture each time Jake remembers them – are they even memories or are they simply taken from the photographs he looks at? It’s a wonderful novel but also sometimes difficult to read, not just because of how this man loses so much as he loses his mind, but the writing is dense, sometimes unfathomable, complicated and twisty, which of course befits the subject. Recommended.
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Buy The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey from Bookshop.org.
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I’m very excited to let you know that fellow author and Oxford University creative writing tutor, Lucy Atkins and I are running a one-day novel writing retreat in Oxford on 13th November 2025. We’ll be teaching character, setting, inspiration, plot and lots more. It’s going to be intense, informative and fun. Places are very limited, so book yours quickly. Click here to find out more.
I’m revisiting some older articles, and this is one, Five on Friday, I wrote for Jill’s Book Cafe Blog back in 2023 just after my fifth novel, The Memory of Animals was published (I’ve edited it slightly to update links etc). Five on Friday takes the format of five questions which require five answers. Read on to find out five things most people don’t know about me, five things I’d still like to achieve, and more.
The Imposters is the second novel where Tom Rachman has chosen to tell the narrative in short stories. He did the same with his debut, The Imperfectionists. Maybe I didn’t like it quite as much as that book, and my favourite is still The Italian Teacher, but The Imposters has made me no less of a Rachman fan.
Dora is an aging Dutch writer whose last novel didn’t sell, and who seems to want to give up writing, but then appears to be writing the book we’re reading, taking memories from her own life and expanding those into stories about other people.
Some of the stories are incredibly moving, disturbing and wonderful. The best of them would be my favourite stories of the year, but of course in any story collection, even those that form a novel, there will be some that are less successful.
The best include a girl backpacking in India in the 1970s when one of the men she meets disappears and there is nothing to be done; Beck, a comedy writer in LA stuck inside during COVID; Amir detained and then tortured in an Iranian prison; and woman who decides to meet the murderer of her children.
Read it and forgive Rachman for Dora and the slightly weaker stories. Highly recommended.
I listened to this as an audio book from Xigxag. Buy it here.
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