Naomi Booth at Serenity Stockport

We like Naomi Booth’s style: red lippy and her first three books all published by Liverpool-based indie Dead Ink Books (who have their own bookshop, in case you didn’t know).

And her new book gets affirmation from Kirsty Logan – ‘A stunning mix of horror and tenderness, love and despair. It’s rare to see such a raw and real account of early motherhood’ – and Ghost Signs author Stu Hennigan, who calls it: ‘A brooding and bruising psychodrama about the anxieties of 21st century motherhood, that links the primal potency of the female body with the northern landscape’s elemental power.’ 

Described as “gripping and life-affirming”, Naomi Booth’s latest novel, raw content, has just been released with Corsair. Set during an atmospheric Yorkshire winter, raw content is the dark, tender and troubled story of a young mother afflicted by compulsive thoughts, whose past has taught her that love and fear are two sides of the same coin.

When protagonist Grace, who spends her days editing legal case files, has an unplanned child, she starts to imagine all sorts of terrible things happening to the child. The steep stairs to her apartment, the kitchen scissors, a boiling kettle are all suddenly dangerous and the baby’s vulnerability terrifies her: fault-lines in her relationship begin to show, and repressed memories resurface. Her father’s job as a police officer working an infamous case and the violent history entrenched in the Colne Valley landscape of her childhood have all affected her deeply, and her fears often surface as recklessness.

Naomi Booth grew up in West Yorkshire and now lives in York. She is the author of the short story collection Animals at Night, shortlisted for the 2023 Edge Hill Prize, winning the Reader’s Choice award, as well as the novels Exit Management – a Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2020 and Animals at Night was – and Sealed, optioned by Erin Richards who is currently working on a script. Naomi’s other short fiction has been listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize and anthologised in Best British Short Stories. Her story ‘Sour Hall’, first published in Virago’s 2020 collection Hag, was adapted into an Audible Originals drama series. She is an Associate Professor at Durham University, and she also writes academic prose, including her recent monograph on the literary history of swooning, Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out.

Naomi will be in conversation with Terri White, former editor-in-chief of Empire magazine and author of the memoir Coming Undone.