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.  

Jane Feaver, "Crazy"

Jane Feaver is a novelist and short story writer. After an English Degree at Oxford, she worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum, then for a dozen years as Assistant Poetry Editor at the publishers, Faber and Faber. In 2001 she moved with her young daughter to Devon to take up a job at the charity, Farms for City Children. It is here that she began to write seriously, and published her first novel, According to Ruth, in 2007, shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Dimplex Prize. After twenty years in the South West, where, latterly she worked as a Senior Lecturer at Exeter University, she moved, mid-pandemic, to Edinburgh, where she intends to remain. Her fourth book, Crazy, is published by Corsair this year. Her website is here. 

About Crazy

Crazy is a splicing of memoir and fiction, an autofiction, which, through the author’s recollection of an ill-fated romantic obsession, dips in and out of childhood to a present day, where she’s beleaguered by an unexplained pain. Questions of love, ambition and identity are held to account. But above all, perhaps, Crazy is about the process of story-making itself, and the ways in which those stories we absorb and accrue become the ones that have the power to break and to make us. 

Below, you can read an extract from the book. 

From Crazy

When I come back in, I ask him how it would be if I stopped taking the pill. He knows this is what I want, the drip-drip of my enthusiasm for children, how they give you the chance to start again, to see the world again from scratch.

‘It’s your body,’ he says. ‘Do what you like.’

Which I take to be a yes. Yes. He’s right, the one thing that isn’t finally in his control, that is in mine, that makes me equal to bird fish dragonfly lion. Yes, by the light of a silvery moon, a phosphorescence, the gentle pitch and creak of a bed on water as he follows me in; yes, to being in the boat together, held and being held, this long history of will-he-won’t-he-madness lain aside. Reptile marmoset phoenix bat. The pin hole of a universe through which the silken night is pushed and spread to cover everything, all creatures great and small, salted with starts, with planetary influence, the pollen shaken from flowers, dustings from wings of bees and other insects that sink straight into the pistil, the holy grail, well met, well met by moonlight, that silver kernel, that pip, which must have been there and you before I knew it. Was it? Whatever happened that night, something did, and for the first time in a long time I wasn’t making it up.