My new novel Lamb is out today from the mighty Dead Ink Books. You can pick up a copy direct from Dead Ink, or through their snazzy new bookshop website. Or you can grab it anywhere else you like to buy your books (ideally your local independent!).
There’s a proper blurb for the book over here, but I’d call it a story of parenthood, grief, memory and renewal. Its general mood is melancholy, tending towards that unmoored, homesicky feeling you experience when life or circumstances change too quickly. There’s also a weird cat.
Lamb was originally conceived as a fictional oral history about a small northern town being destroyed by a strange bioweapon and/or moss-witch, and an attempted government cover-up via ultranationalist militiamen. The idea was partially inspired by the then-fresh Brexit mess; the 1944 Waffen-SS massacre of French civilians in Oradour-sur-Glane; and mostly by Svetlana Alexievich’s masterful Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which I became obsessed with (and which I’ll always rave about).
As work progressed, though, it became pretty clear that much of that early containment/quarantine stuff was getting in the way of an increasingly personal story about three generations of one family. And so, following lots of feedback and good advice, I stripped the novel right back to its heart. Five years, one pandemic and many (many) drafts later, the book now focuses on a complicated but tender son-mother-grandmother relationship, and asks – among other things – whether it’s possible to outrun your upbringing.
Lamb has been a long while in the making, then, and today feels surreal and special. I’m hugely grateful to everybody involved, particularly Dead Ink’s commissioning editor Harriet, my agent Max, cover artist Luke Bird, and the friends, early readers and booksellers who’ve been shouting about it.
Lamb launch events
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be popping up in a few places north, south and Midlands-ish.
12/10: Liverpool launch at Dead Ink Bookshop, 6-8pm – get tickets
14/10 : Glossop signing at Dark Peak Books, 2-4pm
19/10: London launch event at Burley Fisher Books with Dan Coxon, 6.30-9pm – get tickets
27/10: MCM Comic-Con London
29/10: Liverpool signing at Sefton Park Palm House, 1pm – find out more
01/11: Nottingham event at Five Leaves Books with Teika Marija Smits, 7-8.30pm – get tickets
MATT HILL 