New Neil Griffiths novel to Dodo Ink

Dodo Ink is to publish Family of Love by novelist and founder of the The Republic of Consciousness Prize, Neil Griffiths.

Dodo Ink acquired UK and commonwealth rights to the title directly from the author.

Family of Love is an "epic" novel which explores philosophical and spiritual doubt, in the tradition of Dostoevsky. The novel features a married man, McCullough, who suffers an existential crisis. He leaves his middle class job and family behind to build a church on a patch of wasteland, helped by a ragtag group of local drifters. Through McCullough, Griffiths examines the ways in which people become bound together in love, outside the structures of family and religion.

Thom Cuell, Dodo Ink editorial director, said: “Family of Love is an intensely readable, searching novel about an individual’s spiritual and philosophical crisis. In McCullough, Neil Griffiths has created a character struggling to cope with the grand issues of modern life – family, religion and his place in society. This is an epic novel with an extremely relatable human story at its core.”

Sam Mills, Dodo Ink m.d., said, “Family of Love is an ambitious novel which we are very proud to publish. Neil is already an award-winning novelist and we look forward to submitting Family of Love for all the major prizes.”

Griffiths' novel Betrayal in Naples (Viking) won The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2004 and his second novel Saving Caravaggio (Viking) was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award in 2006. This year, Griffiths launched The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, a new literary prize which celebrates “small presses producing brilliant and brave literary fiction”.

Dodo Ink will publish Family of Love in the autumn of 2017.