Corsair snaps up new novel by award-winning author Naomi Booth

Corsair has snapped up the rights to a new novel by award-winning author Naomi Booth. Sarah Castleton, deputy publisher, acquired British Commonwealth rights to raw content  from Sabhbh Curran at Curtis Brown.

The synopsis reads: "The novel centres on a young woman, Grace, living in York. Grace’s work requires her to be careful. She spends her days reading and editing legal case files, making sure the latest judgements are published as quickly and accurately as possible. But outside of her work, Grace is not a careful person. Her father’s history as a police officer working across an infamous case shadows her life, as does the violent history entrenched across the landscape of her childhood, and her fears often surface as recklessness.

"When Grace becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she tries to accommodate her boyfriend and the prospect of the baby in her life. But after the relief and strange joy of the birth, Grace starts to imagine all sorts of terrible injuries and deaths befalling her child. The steep stairs to her apartment, the kitchen scissors, a boiling kettle all suddenly hold visceral and overwhelming potential for disaster. The baby’s vulnerability terrifies her: fault-lines in her relationship begin to show, and her family history and repressed memories of violence break to the surface."

Booth is the author of the short story collection Animals at Night  as well as the novels Exit Management and Sealed (all Dead Ink Books), with Exit Management  being listed as a Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2020, while Animals at Night  was shortlisted for the 2023 Edge Hill Prize, winning the Reader’s Choice Award.

Naomi grew up in West Yorkshire and now lives in York and is also a professor at Durham University.

Castleton said: "raw content is the most brilliant piece of writing. Naomi uses the darkly beautiful, dangerous landscape of the Colne Valley moors to brilliant effect in this short, gripping novel which describes a claustrophobic experience of motherhood in which overwhelming love is experienced as overpowering fear. As women, a lot of us grow up in unsettling landscapes where the dangers awaiting us are rife and urgent; our earliest traumas live in the body, and Naomi’s wonderful novel centres on what happens when those traumas are triggered in motherhood."