Fig Tree wins Faulke’s ‘beautifully moving’ account of carework in four-way auction

Fig Tree has acquired Every Kind of People: A Journey Into The Heart Of Carework by Kathryn Faulke, described by the publisher as “the first-of-its-kind memoir of a home care worker, told through her encounters with the overlooked and often marginalised people she cares for".

Helen Garnons-Williams, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada in a four-publisher auction from Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedmann. Fig Tree will publish in hardback in July 2024.

Every Kind of People recounts Faulke’s experiences as a domiciliary care worker who left a senior role in the NHS to take up what she thought would be a simpler job of caring for people in their own homes. But despite being determined not to become too involved with her "customers", she soon found herself developing firm friendships, forging deep connections and bearing witness to the extraordinary drama to be found in ordinary lives.

The publisher continues: “With energy, compassion and hard-won humour Every Kind of People gives an astonishing insight into this unsung – and often maligned – profession, and into the hidden lives of the housebound and infirm. This beautifully written memoir is clear-eyed about the challenges facing the NHS and the care system, but it is, above all, a celebration of humanity and of the life-changing impact of caring, on those who offer it and those who receive it.”

Garnons-Williams said: “We are proud to welcome Kathryn Faulke to Fig Tree and to be publishing her moving account of working at the ‘coalface of human experience’. With warmth and very great care, she illuminates and celebrates this undervalued profession and the often disregarded people who depend on it.”

Faulke was runner-up in the Wasafiri International New Writing Prize in 2020 and in 2021 she won the Mslexia Memoir Prize for an earlier version of Every Kind of People.

She said: “I’m delighted to bring my early experience as a care worker into the public eye and shine a light on the profession that I have come to love so much. I would like people to understand not only the challenges but the satisfaction and joy to be found in doing this job that is so often swept under the carpet but is so vital to our communities.”

Dixon added: “I knew this powerful and important book would be in the best of hands with Helen and the Fig Tree team and can’t wait for more readers to experience Every Kind of People’s particularly human magic.”