Naomi Booth, "raw content"

Naomi Booth is the author of the short-story collection Animals at Night and the novels Sealed and Exit Management. Her work has been listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, included in the Guardian’s Best Fiction of the Year, and shortlisted for the Edgehill Prize. Her story, ‘Sour Hall,’ which is set in the Calder Valley, won the Edgehill Reader’s Award and was adapted into an Audible Originals drama series. Naomi was born in Bradford and grew up in West Yorkshire. She now lives in York and is Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. Her new novel, raw content, is set between York and the Colne Valley, and is published in March 2025.

About raw content, by Naomi Booth
Grace’s work requires her to be careful. She spends her days reading and editing legal case files, making sure the latest judgments are published as quickly and accurately as possible.

But outside of her work, Grace is not a careful person. Her father’s history as a police officer working across an infamous case shadows her life, as does the violent history entrenched across the Colne Valley landscape of her childhood, and her fears often surface as recklessness. 

When Grace becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she tries to accommodate her boyfriend and the prospect of the baby in her life. But after the relief and strange joy of the birth, Grace starts to imagine all sorts of terrible injuries befalling her child. The steep stairs to her apartment, the kitchen scissors, a boiling kettle all suddenly hold visceral and overwhelming potential for disaster. The baby’s vulnerability terrifies her: fault-lines in her relationship begin to show, and her family history and repressed memories of violence break to the surface.

Tender, gripping and life-affirming, raw content tells the story of a woman grappling with a new form of love that feels like a disaster.

You can read more about raw content on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From raw content

I was born in the back of a Ford Fiesta, a mile shy of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. As my mother screamed and my father caught me – purple and larded with vernix – in his shaking hands, Jacqueline Hill’s body was being uncovered in the thick of nettles and dock and ragwort on a scrap of wasteland twenty miles away. She had disappeared the night before, becoming the final victim of the Yorkshire Ripper. 

I was born in the Colne Valley, into a seam of abandoned mills. The landscape of my childhood was Salendine Nook and Scarbottom and Titanic Mills. Derelict furnace chimneys and saw-tooth roofs were as intrinsic to the valley as the skylarks and meadow pipits that rose in the sky above us to the Pennine moortops. 

I grew up in a house ten miles, as the crow flies, from Saddleworth Moor, where children lay buried under gorse and heather in unmarked graves – if the crow were to fly up over Marsden Moor and Wessenden Reservoir, to the forbidden and terribly beautiful places: to Dovestones Edge and the Boggart Stones.

My childhood was a map marked with danger zones. Titanic Mills, filled with broken glass and pigeon shit, in which we were forbidden to play. The lanes and ginnels and car parks that run behind old coal yards and pubs, in which we were forbidden to play. The secluded crescents of greenspace next to the canal where people dumped old sofas and chest freezers and tins of paint, in which we were forbidden to play. Even the playground at the edge of our estate was to be accessed only in specific circumstances. It had to be daylight; it had to be before seven in the evening; we were not to speak to strangers; me and my sister must always stick together. We were never, ever, to wander away from the playground into the woods, where people sniffed glue and worse. We were never, ever to walk up towards Scapegoat Hill or Marsden Moor. 

Me and my sister were cared for. We were bathed and fed and clothed. But, as with many children, we couldn’t have told you if we were loved. Our experience of care came in the form of a warning.