I’m delighted to have been asked to judge the 2026 Book Edit Writers’ Prize, which is open for entries from British/UK-based writers until 16 October. The prize is aimed at unpublished novelists from backgrounds and communities currently underrepresented in UK publishing. The full eligibility criteria and details of how to enter can be found here. I also recently answered some questions from prize founder Emily Pedder about my career to date and what I’ll be looking for in this year’s submissions
You can read the whole interview here, but right now I want to reflect on my response to just one question. When Emily asked me about my most important advice for emerging writers, I didn’t have to hesitate. ‘Read,’ I said. ‘Read for enjoyment, but also read with a writer’s eye.’ There really is so much a writer can learn by studying the work of other authors – although it’s the kind of learning that may go unnoticed at first, especially when one is in the thrall of a book.
Recently, I had the enjoyable opportunity to reflect on a book that’s made an important mark on both my reading and writing lives. Being a great fan of the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast, it was a thrill to open the new season with hosts Kim Askew and Amy Helmes for a discussion about The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin.
As I shared with Amy and Kim, I have a very strong memory of discovering my old copy of this 1950s suspense novel – since reissued by Faber – in a second-hand bookshop in East London. What first caught my attention was the arresting title, staring out from the spine. When I drew down the book from the shelf and made a start on the first few pages, I was immediately gripped. The Hours Before Dawn is the story of Louise, a sleep-deprived young mother of three small children, whose already exhausting life is put under even greater pressure when a mysterious lodger comes to live at the family home.
If you haven’t read this fine example of early domestic noir, I urge you to do so – not just for its page-turning plot but also how skilfully its author brings the suburban London of the 1950s to life. I have read Fremlin’s book several times over the years. With each new reading I have taken away different things. However, it was perhaps only when I returned to the book to prepare for the Lost Ladies of Lit episode that I fully appreciated the extent to which Fremlin’s novel had influenced my own approach to writing.
At first glance, the early 2000s Japanese setting of my fiction debut, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, is very different from the milieu of 1950s London that Fremlin evokes. On the other hand, much of the action of both books revolves around a very particular living space. In my novel it’s Apartment 603 – where Anna and Loll, the main characters, live – situated within a tower block in the bustling heart of the city. In The Hours Before Dawn it’s a terraced house on a quiet residential street. What both locations share is a set of very fixed boundaries, which can at times make them feel as if they are cut off from the rest of the world.
As I reread Fremlin’s novel, what really hit me this time is just how much I’d learned from her technical expertise: how, with the use of strong pacing and carefully controlled revelation of detail, a writer can use domestic settings such as these to enhance atmospheres of strangeness and growing tension.
As it happens, my Lost Ladies of Lit appearance hasn’t been my only chance of late to reflect on authors whose work has influenced me. A couple of weeks ago, I sat down for a chat with Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, host of The Hypothetical Bookshelf (‘a Desert Island Discs for books’) for a chat about five books that have shaped me as a reader and writer. The episode will air soon, so I should be able to talk more about it in a future newsletter.
In a final bit of podcast-related news, this month I was pleasantly surprised to hear Amelia Kyazze, author of, most recently, The Cinema on Jósef Boulevard, recommend A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing during an episode of Write and Wrong. I was also very happy to spot my novel elegantly photographed on the tea table of popular book blogger, Miranda Mills, whose new release, The Cosy Commonplace Book, is out now in the UK and should shortly be available in the US too. And I was so encouraged by the praise of Instagram reviewer Cornflower Books, who called my novel ‘ thriller-like, cinematic, meticulously observed’ and Ann Kennedy Smith, whose Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society Substack I love, and who said it was a book she ‘genuinely couldn’t put down’.
Since unputdownable is definitely the way I would describe Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn, it was lovely to hear my own book described in similar terms. In addition to the quotes I mention above, I continue to be very moved by the messages and reader reviews I’ve received (on Amazon, GoodReads, Waterstones and elsewhere) from people who have enjoyed my novel. It has been truly wonderful to introduce a few more people to Fremlin’s work this month. In turn, I am enormously appreciative that, thanks to the kind words of my own readers, more people are discovering A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing too.
A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is published by Manilla Press in the UK and is available from Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Bookshop.Org, Amazon or your favourite independent bookshop.
The US paperback will be published by Open Road on 10 November and is available for pre-ordering from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.Org, Amazon and independent bookstores.
The novel is also available as an ebook and as an audiobook, narrated by Jacqui Bardelang.
I was recently announced as the judge of the 2026 Book Edit Writers’ Prize.
I appear on episode 152 of Lost Ladies of Lit ‘Celia Fremlin –The Hours Before Dawn with Emily Midorikawa’
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