Unbound nets two new books from Cox

Unbound has netted two new books from Tom Cox. 

Mathew Clayton, senior editor, acquired world English language rights from Ed Wilson at Johnson & Alcock. The deal includes the first of a proposed Nottinghamshire trilogy. 

The first novel, 1983, is described as both “the story of a semi-rural Nottinghamshire childhood and a culturally and politically pivotal year viewed through the prism of a mining village and one family who resides there”. It will be published  in 2024.  

Cox said: "I am thrilled to be working with Unbound on my second novel, and my sixth book with them overall, and feel confident that no other publisher will make it look more beautiful or give me more freedom to write it with the comprehensive weirdness it deserves. While 983 is my most sci-fi book yet, it’s lots of other things, too. It takes place in the landscape of my Nottinghamshire childhood — headstocks, fish and chip shops, BMX tracks, unreliably rusty cars, miners welfares, building sites and fluffy dice — and is extremely autobiographical in a few ways and extremely non-autobiographical in others.  

“It’s very much its own thing, and unlike anything I’ve ever written before, but to get an idea of the territory it occupies it wouldn’t be vastly far off the mark to imagine a galactically obsessed industrial version of E L Doctorow’s Ragtime set in the East Midlands in the 1980s but with a Pagan robot maker instead of Houdini and where the main form of anarchism takes place in the school classroom and playground. I’m excited to discover what else it will turn out to be about, and whether it might even be the beginning of a loosely linked Nottinghamshire trilogy.” 

Clayton added: “In years to come critics and students will talk about Tom Cox country. It starts at the foot of Cornwall carries on through the south-west then stretches up across the Midlands before reaching out into East Anglia. A sweep of the English countryside that he has made his own. There is no other contemporary writer like him; warm and funny but also a little psychedelic and not afraid of the shadows, he displays a deep sympathy both for the rural landscape and the people that choose to make their lives there. I am delighted that we have signed him up for a further two books.”