Thirst paperback out now - read all about it - see what I did there - happy birthday to Dave and Alena and their beautiful bruised love story

So yes, THIRST is out in beautiful, beautiful paperback* today. Available in all good…etc. 

My love story about two people who might never have met but somehow overcome their pasts, their differences, their need to protect themselves and their sore hearts to love each other. 

Alena from Siberia - here I think of my journey across Russia on the top bunk of sweltering trains, watching the green and grey of that vast country sweep by, sharing bread, cheese and cucumber with elderly carriage mates…and in every place I stopped seeing an ‘Alena’, slowly learning her, learning her wants and dreams. 

Dave from Hackney - and I think of think of the years I lived and loved on that stretch of Kingsland Rd. I’ve shared a lot of kisses on that street, cried on corners and danced in public with happiness - it was inevitable I would take Dave, lost and lonely, and put him somewhere so full of life he’d have no option but to live himself. 

This is my fourth year of having a book newly in shops and I am no less amazed or grateful that this has happened. A child who was told that voices like hers - working class, female, queer - shouldn’t count somehow gets to write books and then people open their hearts and heads and…listen. And sometimes, quite often it seems, they are nourished somehow from that. I get to show them a different world, I get to give them that sort of gift for listening…I really am tremendously fucking lucky. 

So yes…this was meant to be a short post…but basically FUCKING YES for books and readers and fragile love stories in unlikely places.

*Illustrated by the amazing Fortuna Todisco…the actual Kingsland Rd, and actual Dave and Alena drawn to my specification.