Allen Lane lands 'ground-breaking' non-fiction from Shon Faye

Allen Lane has landed “yet another ground-breaking piece of non-fiction" from Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue (Allen Lane).  

Tom Penn, publishing director at Penguin Press, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Love in Exile from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander Associates. Allen Lane will publish the book in spring 2025. 

Love in Exile is described as “a meditation on love, fulfilment, and escaping the confines of a ‘normal life’”. The synopsis says: “As a trans person who grew up visibly queer prior to transition, Faye’s life has alienated her from many of society’s heterosexual expectations: here she unpicks these assumptions with wit and devastating clarity.  

“Having spent much of her late twenties and early thirties trying – and often failing – to find the relationship, career, sex life and social life she equated with happiness and success, Faye began to realise that many of the women around her were also burning out in pursuit of these ideals, where the stakes seemed high and the rewards often disappointing. If we reject this idea of what a young woman’s life should be, Faye asks, what comes next?”  

Faye said: “I am delighted to be working with Allen Lane again on my second book. It is a privilege to work with a publisher who understands my desire to write about the world from the vantage point of a trans woman without being bound by that aspect of my identity. One way in which a negative cultural fixation on trans women binds us is to insist we must be experts on gender and seldom speak about the rest of our human experience. These days, I’m much more interested in the challenges I’ve experienced in acknowledging my own capacity for love in a culture which tried to teach me I was unlovable.” 

Penn added: “We are so delighted to be working again with Shon on Love in Exile. It’s deeply personal and characteristically clear-sighted: a book that, in considering how we experience love in a lonely age, cuts to the heart of our culture. Shon is a beautiful, essential voice for our times, and Love in Exile is a book we all need.” 

Paterson also commented: “Working with Shon Faye has been one of the high points of my career so far and the prospect of a second book, fuelled again by her intelligence, insight and wit, is reason to celebrate. After the success of The Transgender Issue, I cannot wait to see how Allen Lane publish yet another ground-breaking piece of non-fiction from one of our most important thinkers.”