Scratch Books to publish Carroll’s debut collection as its first ever single-author volume

Claire Carroll’s debut short story collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer, has gone to Scratch Books.

Publisher Tom Conaghan acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Ludo Cinelli at Eve White Literary Agency. The collection will be Scratch Books’ first single-author volume and will be published in May 2024.

The Unreliable Nature Writer comprises 18 stories with themes of late capitalism, climate anxiety and personal loss. Among them is The White Review Short Story Prize-shortlisted My Brain is Boiling with Ideas, in which a woman begins an affair with an android.

Carroll’s short fiction and poetry have been published by journals including The London Magazine, Gutter, perverse, Lunate, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction.

Conaghan said: “Since we first read Claire Carroll’s work in the 2021 White Review Short Story prize list, we have been intrigued by the astonishing world of her stories – her beautiful, passionate and exhilarating acknowledgement of human relations under the strain of both intimate and global anxieties. After a number of high-profile multi-author anthologies that have brought new audiences to the short story, Scratch Books chose this superb collection to be our first single author collection.”

Carroll said: “I’m excited to be collaborating with Scratch to bring my collection into the world. I wrote this book during the strange intensity of 2020, so it’s surreal and exhilarating to know that it has found a home with such a dynamic publisher.”

Cinelli added: “Claire Carroll’s stories are as urgent as they are mordant, and their chilling worlds throw our increasingly strange lives into relief; Scratch Books is an ambitious publisher championing this wonderful form and, together, they will make a formidable team.”