Tag: Blackwell’s

Out today: A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 2 Comments
Book signing at London’s Goldsboro Books

It still feels surreal to me that the novel I began close to a quarter of a century ago is finally being published by Manilla Press today! It amazes me that I can now walk into a UK bookshop and pick up a hardback copy of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. The novel is also available as an ebook and audiobook, beautifully narrated by Jacqui Bardelang.

I’ve spent some very happy hours this week signing copies of my novel at Burley Fisher Books, Goldsboro Books and West End Lane Books in London ahead of today’s official release date. It was also a thrill to launch A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing into the world a couple of days early with a pre-publication event at Burley Fisher, chaired by my friend and Secret Sisterhood coauthor, Emma Claire Sweeney.

Since Emma has been a part of my novel’s strange and convoluted journey right from the beginning, when we were both young English language teachers in Japan, it felt particularly apt that she should be the one sitting there with me in that East London bookshop on Tuesday asking me questions about the book and its long and winding course to publication.

Emma’s engaging interviewing style kept us all entertained at my book launch

As I wrote in a previous newsletter, the two years I spent in Japan as a young woman – and meeting Emma in particular – marked both a personal turning point and the very start of my writing career. And so sitting there in a shop packed with family and friends that evening really felt like the culmination of a very long chapter in my life as well as a new beginning.

Other things I’ve been up to this week include recording an episode for one of my favourite podcasts, Lost Ladies of Lit, to air as part of their next season in September. It was such fun to chat with Kim Askew and Amy Helmes, and to share my passion for the 1950s domestic noir The Hours Before Dawn, which I count as a literary influence. I also took part in the July Bàrd Debuts night at Bàrd Books, at which I shared the stage with other debut novelists: Lorna Elcock, Karishma Jobanputra, Kim Willis, Phil Melanson and Stacey Yu.

Tonight I’ll be at Blackwell’s in Manchester, where I’ll be in conversation with Susan Barker, author of Old Soul. On Wednesday 29 July I’ll be heading further north for an event at Collected in Durham. I’ll be back in London for a talk at Woolwich Library on Thursday 6 August, co-presented by the JET Alumni Association. If you can make it to any of these events, it would be lovely to see you.

Like Tuesday’s discussion with my longtime friend and writing partner Emma, there is an element of things coming full circle with the Woolwich Library event in particular.

The two years I spent living and working in Japan in my twenties were organised by the JET Programme. If I had not applied for this scheme, I would not have met Emma; I would quite possibly never experienced living in the country in which my mother grew up; would most certainly never have written A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. Perhaps I will have the chance to reflect on some of these things on 6 August in Woolwich. Either way, I am definitely looking forward to this event.

If you can’t make it to any of my live talks, but would be interested in finding out a bit more about A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing and the story behind it, you might want to take a look at this video conversation between me and the author and creative coach Rachel Connor. I’ll be sharing more news of video and audio content in my future newsletters, as well as getting back to the usual essay style of these postings next month.

For now, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has supported my novel at different stages along the way. That includes all the individuals and organisations mentioned in this post, plus my literary agent Ariella Feiner and editor Zoe Yang who were in it for the long haul, my friends and family, and every single person who’s taken the time to buy a copy or spread the word about A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. It may sound trite, but I mean it sincerely: your encouragement really has meant the world to me.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is published by Manilla Press and is available as a hardback, ebook and audiobook. In the UK, copies are available from Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Bookshop.Org, Amazon or your favourite independent bookshop.

The US e-book, published by Open Road on 4 August, is available for pre-ordering from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.Org, Amazon and independent bookstores. The US paperback will be released in November and will be available for pre-ordering soon. (The audiobook is already available in the US and Canada, as it is elsewhere.)

Tickets for these upcoming events are available at the following links: Blackwells, Manchester (Thursday 23 July), Collected in Durham (Wednesday 29 July) and ‘A Tiny Speck of Black and then a Conversation with Emily Midorikawa’ presented by Woolwich Library & JET AA in London (Thursday 6 August).

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing was included in the Crib Notes Hot Mum Summer Reading List 2026.

If you would like to make sure you receive my next monthly essay, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

The Headspace to Dream: starting out as a writer in a world offline

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 2 Comments

For me at least, it’s hard to believe that A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing – the novel I began while I was living in Japan in the early 2000s – will be released by Manilla Press in a month’s time. You can preorder it now (as a hardback, ebook or audiobook), and even take an early peek by requesting a proof on NetGalley.

For North American readers, the ebook of the novel will be published by Open Road Integrated Media on 4 August and is also available for preordering now. Paperback and audiobook versions will follow.

If you’d like to hear me talking in person about A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, it would be great to see you at one of my UK book tour events this summer. A date recently added is the Bàrd Debuts night at Bàrd Books in London on Wednesday 22 July, where I’ll be appearing with a group of exciting new authors. I’ll also be at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July and Collected in Durham on Wednesday 29 July. I will be adding more dates to my Events page soon.

The North American cover

These public gatherings are a far cry indeed from the solitary headspace in which the first fragments of my novel began to emerge over two decades ago. When the characters and locations of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing started to appear to me in flickering snapshots, I was a young English language teacher in my early twenties, living alone in a tiny studio flat in the Japanese city of Matsuyama.

To be clear, this wasn’t an isolated existence in any real sense of the word. My job teaching English in local high schools involved regular interactions with Japanese students and coworkers, and there were several other young expatriate teachers living within the same city. My flat was situated in a residential area. I could frequently hear conversations humming through the walls of neighbouring apartments; noise from the warehouse next door; traffic flowing along the road beyond. Nonetheless, looking back, it’s striking how alone I was there in comparison to how it would have been if I’d arrived at that address today.

In my flat, I had a landline telephone, a television, a radio. But making calls to family and friends in Britain was expensive, and, at least initially, there were few people in Japan that I could ring for a chat. My limited Japanese language meant I could make little sense of the TV. Speech on the radio, with no visuals to help, was even more mystifying. Typically for the era, I had no home internet connection. For part of my time in Matsuyama I did own a mobile phone, which I used for making calls and sending texts; that’s all. It had a colour camera, capable of capturing grainy, pixelated images, and seemed impossibly modern at the time. But it was definitely not a smartphone.

My location and living set-up differed in key ways from that of Anna, the protagonist of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. Anna lives in Osaka, a much bigger city than Matsuyama. Rather than living alone, she has a flatmate, the enigmatic Charlotte – better known as Loll – with whom Anna develops an intense friendship. On the other hand, the novel’s action takes place in roughly the same period that I lived in Japan, and Anna’s experiences – as a British-Japanese young woman uprooted to a culture she only partially knows – share some similarities with my own.

In A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, Anna’s feelings of isolation contribute to the ease with which she falls so quickly under her glamorous flatmate’s spell. Loll is a nightclub hostess with a mysterious past, someone who – unlike the seemingly more cautious Anna – is reckless and impulsive, at least as far as first appearances go. When, part way through the novel, Loll disappears, Anna’s attempts to discover the fate of her friend are hindered by the many secrets Loll kept, which begin to unfurl as soon as she vanishes from view.

Although this was of course not apparent to me when I began drafting the book, the process of revising it over the past two years has highlighted the extent to which Anna’s efforts to find out what happened to her friend are impeded by the technology available to her at the time. When Loll goes missing, Anna struggles to quickly spread the word; to locate individuals who might be able to help in her search; even to find her way around Osaka in an era of often unreliable paper maps, written in a language she can barely read.

In a much lower-stakes way,  I encountered all of these kinds of issues during the two years I spent living in the Japan of the early aughts. But in my case, such limitations provided not painful restrictions but rather important opportunities to begin to hone my craft.

With no access to an endless library of on-line content, no opportunities for endless phone scrolling, I filled the many hours I spent alone in my flat listening to music on CDs, cooking whatever I felt like eating, watching English-language films on video cassettes; mixing cocktails for one and feeling decadent about it; reading voraciously and daydreaming.

What I read, in the main, were translated novels by Japanese authors – mostly contemporary figures. My Japanese mum – who, unlike Anna’s absent mother, was very much a part of my life –  had previously introduced me to several Japanese works of the Heian period (Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, for instance). But, prior to arriving in Japan as a young graduate, I’d known very little about modern Japanese fiction. It’s strange to recall that there was a time when British bookshops were not full of Japanese books catering to all manner of tastes from the milieux of the most gruesome thrillers to that of cosy cafés and wandering cats.

Travelling, and dreaming, as an apprentice writer in the early 2000s. (Note: this wasn’t my studio flat!)

It was thrilling to discover a whole new world of books and to have seemingly endless time to explore them.

As to what I used to daydream about, there were so many things: the future; the past; a lot about love; and my hopes of becoming a better writer. As time went on, though, I found myself dreaming more and more about the hazy, half-formed Osaka setting of my novel-in-embryo. And eventually I would take those dreams and begin, hesitantly, to type sentences on a laptop – one that functioned as little more than an old-fashioned word processor, and which, like so many aspects of my life back then, felt pleasingly disconnected from the rest of the world.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing will be published as a hardback, ebook and audiobook by Manilla Press on 23 July. UK copies are available for pre-ordering from Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Bookshop.Org, Amazon, or your favourite independent bookshop.

The US e-book, published by Open Road on 4 August, is available for pre-ordering from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.Org, Amazon and independent bookstores. The audiobook will be available everywhere (including the US and Canada) from 23 July. The US paperback will be released in November and will be available for pre-ordering soon.

Tickets for these upcoming events are available at the following links: Bàrd Debuts at Bàrd Books (Wednesday 22 July), Blackwells, Manchester (Thursday 23 July) and Collected in Durham (Wednesday 29 July).

If you would like to make sure you receive my next monthly essay, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Retrieving an Abandoned Book from a Bottom Drawer

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 2 Comments

Last month, I mentioned that I’ll be marking UK publication day for my debut novel A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing with an event at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July. I’m now delighted to be able to let you know that I’ll also be giving a talk at the fantastic independent bookshop Collected in Durham on Wednesday 29 July, so if you can’t make it to Manchester (or even if you can) I’d love to see you in Durham.

Poster for my event at Collected Books on their shop noticeboard

I’ll be adding more bookings to my events page soon and will continue to share news about them through this newsletter and on Instagram, Threads and Bluesky.

Speaking of bookshop events, here, on the other side of the Atlantic, I recently attended a fascinating talk at Lost City Books in Washington DC. Kanako Nishi, author of the novel Sakura, was appearing on a panel with her literary translator, Allison Markin Powell.

In Sakura, Nishi paints a loving picture of a close-knit Japanese working-class family that suddenly finds itself thrown into a state of shocking emotional turmoil. It was originally published in Japan in 2005, but only came out in English translation this year. Although Nishi’s publishing journey doesn’t exactly mirror mine, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a marked similarity between our two positions. As I mentioned in my April newsletter, there is a gap of over twenty years between the time when I began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing in the early 2000s and its publication date this July.

During the bookshop Q&A, I asked Nishi what it was like to be on tour promoting a book that she wrote so many years earlier. In the engagingly relaxed speaking style evident throughout her talk, she replied that it was a bit like having someone read your personal diary from that time – which was maybe not the most reassuring answer for me, but certainly made us all laugh!

Relaxing with my copy of Sakura by Kanako Nishi (translated by Allison Markin Powell)

In the weeks since that book event, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Nishi’s words. Although I can’t yet summarise the experience of discussing my novel in public, I can say something about how strange it has sometimes felt to be working in private on a long abandoned manuscript that I began when I was young.

When, to my utter astonishment, an editor who’d read A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing some years ago suddenly got back in touch with my literary agent and offered to take it on, I realised that I’d better quickly reread the book to see exactly what was there.

Given that I hadn’t looked at its pages in almost a decade, it was with some trepidation that I opened up the document on my computer.

I worried that the story wouldn’t hold together; that sentences originally penned when I was a less experienced writer might amount to something that was, well … just, quite bad; and that the book’s once contemporary, early 2000s setting might come across as dated.

Once I began reading, however, I felt pleasantly surprised. Despite seeing at once that plenty of work was needed – and the manuscript would, indeed, undergo at least five more significant redrafts – I was relieved to find that the essence of the story could remain as it was. As for the writing, I’d be lying if I denied that there were lines that made me cringe, instances of clunky phrases, metaphors that seemed muddled. But thankfully, my prior experience of publishing two other (nonfiction) books had taught me that problems such as these were fixable.

What then of the question of how much the novel had dated?

Beginning to read it again in early 2024, with a publishing deal on the table at last, I found that, yes, in some ways, the two-decade gap in time seemed vast. It was immediately apparent in everything from the colloquial language of the book’s characters, to the technology they used, to the extent to which their day-to-day lives were lived largely offline.

But as I made my way through the manuscript I realised that, in setting my novel in the early aughts I had inadvertently captured something of an era that was on the cusp of huge social change. As my characters moved through the book’s Osaka cityscape –  taking blurry images on their first camera phones, listening to music on CDs, making decisions about where to go out at night based on enticements promised by paper flyers – they had no idea how soon the prevalence of social media, smartphones and the internet in their pockets would completely alter the way they lived.

Rather than trying to work around these things, to try to make A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing seem more up-to-date, I decided that what I should do instead was to lean into these aspects of my novel. And as it would turn out, revisiting this recent-yet-distant past would become one of the most enjoyable aspects of redrafting. While perhaps not exactly like reopening the pages of an old diary, the process brought back enough memories of the early 2000s that, sitting at my desk in the months leading up to publication, it would often feel to me – and thrillingly so – as if I were living in two eras at once.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing will be published by Manilla Press on 23 July 2026 and is available for pre-ordering now.

Tickets for my Blackwells, Manchester event (where I’ll be in conversation with the author of Old Soul, Susan Barker) are available here.

Tickets for my Collected event in Durham are available here.

If you would like to make sure you receive my next monthly essay, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

The Long and Winding Road to Publication

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 6 Comments

There are just under three months to go until A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, the novel I began over twenty years ago, will be published in the UK. I’ll be back in Britain for much of the summer and will be marking publication day with an event at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July. I will be in conversation with Susan Barker, author of the highly acclaimed literary horror novel Old Soul among other brilliant books.

I still sometimes struggle to comprehend that I am in this position at all – preparing to speak at public events about a novel I’d once thought would never see the light of day. Tickets are available here. If you can make it to Manchester, I would love to see you at Blackwell’s!

As I wrote last month, I began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing when I was in my early twenties and working as an English language teacher in Japan. After returning to the UK, aged 23, I initially moved back to the town where I grew up, took a part-time secretarial job that left me ample time to keep working on my novel, and began applying to university creative writing programmes.

Following an acceptance to UEA’s famous MA course, I packed the bag containing my laptop and the loose printed pages of my novel-in-progress with a great deal of nervous excitement. But my time at UEA, though wonderful in many ways, would turn out to be more emotionally difficult than I’d anticipated.

Halfway through the year, my father died. Losing him when I was still only in my mid-twenties, had a profound effect on me. Afterwards I never felt young in the same way again, and, looking back, I can see how the grief I felt transformed the way I wrote about loss in my book.

By the time I left UEA, I had a scrappy first draft. An extract published in that year’s course anthology attracted the interest of a couple of literary agents, but it didn’t lead to any formal offers of representation, much less to a publishing deal.

Still, I kept going, (mostly) firm in my belief that – although aspects of my novel still needed lots of work – I had a story worth telling. Eventually, a different agent took me on and, after revising the manuscript extensively with her, I steeled myself as it went out on mass submission to publishers. Some editors showed an interest in the book’s urban Japanese setting; my depictions of hostess bars; and the central storyline of an intense friendship between two young women, one of whom suddenly disappears. But, although I seemed to get close on a few occasions, it didn’t lead to a publishing contract.

By this stage, I had been living with A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing for a long time – around eight years in fact. Having already committed so much time and energy to the novel, it was very difficult to put it aside. Dejectedly, I did, though, to concentrate on other writing projects, including various collaborations with Emma Claire Sweeney, whose friendship – as I described in my March post – has been of the utmost importance to me.

In 2012, my mother died. I was 32, still relatively young to have lost both my parents. Again, as in the case of my dad’s passing, the long shadow cast by Mum’s death would go on to affect the ways in which I approached the theme of loss in my novel when I unexpectedly found myself returning to work on it some years into the future.

During the decade and more when A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing largely languished in a metaphorical bottom drawer, I occasionally dusted off the draft to enter it into competitions for unpublished writers. My novel had some success with the SI Leeds Literary Prize and Yeovil Literary Prize. Then in 2015, it made the shortlist for the influential Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. At that year’s prize ceremony, to which I took Emma as my guest, I was stunned to hear my name announced as the winner.

Being announced as the 2015 winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize by Professor Janet Todd OBE
(Image courtesy of Lucy Cavendish College)

It is hard to overstate the impact of these small victories on my confidence at a time when my belief that A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing would ever be published was at an all-time low. These wins opened doors, offered unexpected opportunities and led to lasting friendships with fellow shortlistees and other people associated with the awards.

Such prizes also helped me to be taken more seriously when I was pitching proposals for my two nonfiction books, A Secret Sisterhood (cowritten with Emma Claire Sweeney) and Out of the Shadows, published in 2017 and 2021 respectively. Both were historical group biographies. I relished the research and writing of these works, but after Out of the Shadows came out I decided that I wanted to give fiction another go.

As the mother of two small children by then, my progress was slow and steady. But I had begun a new novel when, completely out of the blue, in early 2024, I received word from my agent that that an editor who’d read the manuscript of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing some time ago was asking if it was still available.

In the years since she had begun representing me as a writer, my agent (whose commitment to this novel has been extraordinary) had continued to show my manuscript to editors from time to time. As before, some had shown an interest but nothing had ever worked out. So, although I was happy for this editor to take another look at the work, I didn’t hold out much hope.

You can imagine my amazement then when, two decades after I first began writing my novel, I found myself signing a publishing contract at last – and being faced with the somewhat daunting prospect of returning, in mid-life, to a book I originally conceived as a young woman.

The process of revising the manuscript for publication has been surprising, challenging and illuminating – and more than a little uncanny at times. There has also been pleasure in meeting the writer I once was on the page, and in the realisation that the passage of time has, in fact, enriched the story I am able to tell.

In May, I will explore what it’s like to come back to a creative work after a long break.  If you would like to make sure you receive this next monthly post, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing will be published by Manilla Press on 23 July 2026 and is available for pre-ordering now.

Tickets for my Blackwells, Manchester event with Susan Barker are available here.