After a long hiatus, I’m so happy to be able to be able to announce that I have a new book coming out this year!

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing – my debut novel – will be published by Manilla Press in July 2026.

Set in the Japanese city of Osaka in the early 2000s, it is the story of Anna, who teaches English to bored students by day; and Loll, who passes her nights working in the smoky atmosphere of the Moonglow hostess bar, where she pours men’s drinks, lights their cigarettes and laughs playfully at their jokes. Unlike Anna, who has come to Japan to learn more about her Japanese heritage, Loll seems to have no clear reason for being there and no easily discernible past. And so when she suddenly disappears, there are only the barest clues as to where she might have gone. But, desperate to find her friend, Anna refuses to give up. Soon she is thrown onto a trail that will take her into the darkest corners of the neon-choked metropolis – hidden, forbidden places from which those who know the city best warn her to stay away.

To readers of A Secret Sisterhood and Out of the Shadows, this may seem like something of a departure from my last two published works, which were both historical group biographies.

However, my novel doesn’t really feel like a departure to me. This is, in part, because I began work on it many years ago, meaning that its development overlapped with the period when I was researching and planning A Secret Sisterhood (coauthored with Emma Claire Sweeney). It’s also because, having already published my two nonfiction books by the time I began revising the novel ahead of this year’s release, the lessons I’d learned from those experiences fed into the way I approached redrafting the novel. Finally, being able to view all three complete texts now, I can see links between these books – shared concerns; repeated motifs – that were not apparent to me before.

I first began sketching out A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing well over two decades ago, when I was in my early twenties and living in Japan. I am in my mid-forties now (and living, for the time being, in the USA), which may give something of a sense of what a long and convoluted path this book has taken to publication!

While A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is a work of fiction, it was influenced indirectly by the two years I spent working in Japan as a high school English teacher; my experience growing up in a British-Japanese household; and the family stories my mother used to tell me.

I’ll be sharing more about all of these things in the near future, but for now I’ll just leave you with the news that until this Friday only (20 February 2026) Waterstones has a 25%-off offer on preorders for the hardback.

As you might know, preorders are enormously helpful to authors because they let publishers and booksellers know ahead of publication that there is already reader interest in a book. If you are thinking about purchasing a copy anyway, I’d be very grateful if you would consider preordering one from Waterstones.

• The offer runs only from 07.00 on Tuesday 17 February until 23.59 on Friday 20 February (UK, GMT)
• Customers will need to enter the code “FEB26” at the checkout to redeem the offer to receive 25% off the RRP.
• The offer will be exclusively available on the Waterstones website and the Waterstones app.

Being able to say that  A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is going to be published, more than twenty years after I began it, still feels a bit unbelievable. For a long time, I had given up on the possibility of it ever seeing the light of day.

If you’d like to hear more about how the book was rescued from its metaphorical bottom drawer, its plot, main characters and inspirations – and you don’t already receive emails from this site to your inbox –  please use the sign-up box on my homepage to get yourself on my mailing list.

This has all been a long time coming. I really look forward to sharing more about the twists and turns of this novel’s unlikely journey with you.