Hutchinson Heinemann Fiction 2024 Showcase reveals 'propulsive' books by Obioma and Godfrey
Hutchinson Heinemann ran its Fiction 2024 showcase on the evening of Wednesday 1st November with authors including Flora Carr, Jennie Godfrey, Suzie Miller, Chigozie Obioma and Vanessa Walters discussing their forthcoming novels.
The event brought together journalists, publishers, authors and retailers at the Hoxton Hotel in London.
Ailah Ahmed, publishing director, and Helen Conford, publisher, introduced the showcase, which was bookended by wine and canapes.
Cornerstone m.d. Venetia Butterfield revealed how she had felt compelled to buy the debut of part-time bookseller Godfrey’s “highly propulsive”, The List of Suspicious Things (acquired in a pre-empt last year after Butterfield stayed up until 3am reading it).
Butterfield said: “I don’t buy many books anymore, I’m not really supposed to, but I only do it when I fall in love with something extraordinary and there are actually novelists here who I’ve naughtily bought. And The List of Suspicious Things is exactly that, an extraordinary novel.
"Publishers are a jaded lot – when we’ve read and seen everything, when we’re reading submissions we’re reading it with the assumption that we’re going to turn it down because usually that is the case, but Jenny had me from the very first line: ‘It would be easy to say it that it all started with the murders but actually it began when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister’.”
Godfrey was born and raised in Yorkshire and the novel was partly inspired by her father having worked alongside Peter Sutcliffe, the man eventually convicted as the Yorkshire Ripper.
Walters also discussed how her literary mystery, The Lagos Wife, was partly about her own experience. “I was valued as a mother and a wife but not so much as an individual, I had not found a purpose in being there – I was that body floating by, seen and unseen.”
Miller revealed how she adapted her famed stage play, “Prima Facie", which starred Jodie Comer as a working class barrister in her West End debut.
Miller said of her childhood: “I didn’t grow up in a family of books, but books were everything to me. So all you booksellers out there, books were the beginning of me transcending class and becoming someone who could have a voice.”
Carr, formerly part of the London Library Emerging Author scheme, revealed how a chance discovery about a time in Mary Stuart’s life led her to explore the friendships and loves of the fated monarch. The Tower, a feminist historical debut set during Mary Queen of Scots’ imprisonment in Lochleven Castle, is out in February 2024.
Finally, the twice Booker-shortlisted Obioma told the audience how his coming-of-age novel The Road to the Country was influenced by the Nigerian Civil War and the secrecy around it. “It happened, I witnessed it [the secrecy]. My Dad found out his best friend of 30 years was a lieutenant in the army and he had never known… he was so shocked. My Dad said: ‘I thought you’d never hurt a fly but you were commander of a unit.’”
He added: “The novel is about the friendships and the brotherhood. What feels like a very bad thing for him [the protagonist] is ultimately redemptive.”
