Canongate acquires James Meek’s Your Life Without Me

Canongate has acquired James Meek’s new novel Your Life Without Me.

Publisher-at-large Francis Bickmore bought world rights (excluding the US) from Natasha Fairweather of RCW Literary Agency. The book is set to publish in spring 2026.

The synopsis said: "Mr Burman is feeling unmoored. Still reckoning with the death of his wife Ada, and struggling to cope with his hostile daughter Leila, he finds himself on a train to London at the invitation of the Metropolitan Police.

"Someone has attempted to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral. Police believe Burman’s connection to the accused—a young man named Raf, whom he taught and who once dated his daughter—might help unlock the truth."

It added: "Mr Burman’s journey south is into a sinister justice system, towards the mystery of Raf’s motives, and into the nature of his own family. Compelling and compassionate, this novel explores what a person leaves behind when they’ve gone, and how much of the past we might take with us into the future."

Meek is the author of six other novels, including The People’s Act of Love (Canongate), which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. He has also written two collections of short stories and two books of non-fiction, including Private Island (Verso Books), which won the 2015 Orwell Prize, while his book To Calais, In Ordinary Time (Canongate) was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the Guardian and New York Times. He lives in London.

Meek said: "This is a book about what gets left behind when someone or something wonderful disappears. Can they be replaced? Loss also demands consideration of how we might have lived differently. I look forward [to] working with Canongate to bring it to readers."

Bickmore added: "I found it his most moving yet, a profound book about the nature of loss and change, and the paradox of how we must all face the future before we have let go of the past. A master explorer of the architecture of the human heart, Meek also deploys his panoptic understanding of the ways in which commerce, government and family life operate on us all."