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Irish Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Names by Florence Knapp: what's in a name?
The Names Author : Florence Knapp ISBN-13 : 978-1399624022 Publisher : Phoenix Guideline Price : £13.99 Can a name shape one's destiny? Knapp's high-concept debut ponders this question with remarkable psychological nuance. The story begins in 1987 with Cora on her way to register her infant son's name, with her daughter Maia in tow. Cora's real concern is that she will 'formalise who he will become' based on what she names him. Her husband Gordon has instructed her to name the baby after him, to carry on the family's tradition. She fears that this would burden him with the abusive legacy of his namesakes. 'It feels like a chest-beating, tribal thing ... that will tie him to generations of domineering men.' She prefers the name Julian, which means sky father. Maia suggests Bear because it is 'all soft and cuddly and kind ... but also, brave and strong'. READ MORE This seemingly innocuous decision to name a baby is the sliding-doors moment in this novel that charts the destiny of this family in three alternate storylines. The chapters are spaced seven years apart and titled after each of the three names. Gordon is a reputable doctor but an abusive patriarch at home. The overarching theme of the three storylines is the repercussions of living under the fear of domestic abuse. In each storyline, guilt and trauma dominate the interior psychological landscapes of the three main characters – Cora, Maia and the boy. Knapp shrewdly weaves together three distinct permutations of this family's future into a single tapestry with perceptive insight. The narrative remains consistently emotionally engaging, which is no mean feat for a debut novelist. The story resonates on many levels. It depicts an evocative portrayal of children who grow up under the shadow of a narcissistic father, conditioning them to become hypervigilant and pander to authority. In a poignant moment, Cora observes this in how her nine-year-old daughter has learned 'to soothe, to placate' and is 'attuned to the undercurrents in a room'. In another devastating instance, the grown-up boy asks his sister Maia, 'Do you think Dad consumed me?' – a stark illustration of the tyranny of an abusive parent. The Names is an exquisitely layered story about the ripple effects of trauma and choices – and the legacy they leave behind.
Irish Times
18-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Can a name determine our fate? Florence Knapp on her debut novel
In the opening pages of Florence Knapp's powerful debut novel The Names, her lead character Cora is faced with a dilemma. Her husband wants to call their new baby Gordon, after him and his father before him. Cora does not want to name the child Gordon. Not simply because she doesn't like the name, but because she is afraid the name will somehow contribute to her beautiful new baby emulating his father. Cora only hints at it in that exact moment, but subsequent pages make it clear: Gordon Atkin is not a nice man. Although he is a doctor and respected in the community, at home, Cora and her nine-year-old daughter Maia live in fear of Gordon's every move: he is controlling, unpredictable and violent. So, in 1987, at the registrar's office, Cora makes a decision that will shape the rest of their lives: she gives her baby his name. Three different narratives spin off in parallel from that moment. As the novel unfolds, we find out what happens if the child is called Gordon, after his father; or Julian, Cora's chosen name for him; or Bear, his sister's hoped-for name for him. Each decision has enormous consequences, because, in the coercive control situation Cora is in, no decision is small. 'I've always been interested in the things that shape us as people,' Knapp says, describing the roots of the novel over a video call from her home near London. 'Whether that's our upbringing or our circumstances or the people we're friends with, or just those moments where something that's meant to be an innocuous, small thing happens, but it lodges in our psyche and becomes a far bigger thing. To me, a name felt at the root of all that, because we're given it at birth, and then carry it through the whole of our lives with us.' READ MORE The naming device is a clever route into the issue of domestic abuse and its effects on a wife and family. No decision that Cora makes can be the correct one; whether she defies Gordon or obeys him, as long as she remains in their home, she is at his mercy. When Cora names her boy Bear, the first thing she does on returning home is to put him in his Moses basket and hide him in her closet, to protect him from the anger she knows is coming. When Cora names him Gordon, her depression mounts to such an extent that she feels detached from her own body and cannot bond with him. When Cora names him Julian, the narrative jumps to Ireland, where Cora's mother Sílbhe must take care of the children because something awful has happened to Cora: she has disappeared from her own narrative. The book is devastating to read, as early reviews have acknowledged: plaudits have poured in from authors including JoJo Moyes , Marian Keyes and Ann Napolitano . In Britain, the book was snapped up by Orion after a 13-way auction and in the United States after a 10-way auction; it is being translated into more than 20 languages. Clad in a simple black top, her hair scraped back, and positioned at her laptop in front of a dark green library full of books, Knapp is nervous at the prospect of doing interviews and becoming a more public person. She has been deeply moved by the responses to the book. 'The thing that has really shocked me is how many people I've heard from who have said that this has been their situation or upbringing,' she says. 'It means a lot to me to hear from people, but I feel so sad that it feels so familiar and real to people.' It's perhaps not coincidental that the idea for the novel came to Knapp during Covid, a time when 5km travel restrictions were in place in many regions, effectively trapping sufferers of domestic abuse in their homes. The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Orion In 2020, Knapp was part of an online Royal Literary Fund community reading group that happened to have a worker from a women's refuge log on to speak to them as part of their course. 'She told us the details of her job and I found it really hard not to close the lid of the laptop,' Knapp says, 'because it made me feel like crying and I was embarrassed to be seen crying in front of her when that was the reality of her job. The things I'd heard: I couldn't get them out of my mind. On an emotional level, I [wanted] to write to gain an understanding.' As with Emma Donoghue's novel Room, or Adolescence , the Netflix show about the murder of a teenager, Knapp was conscious of the delicacy and the enormity of the task, the need to balance light and shade. 'What's often used in entertainment is a woman being scared, and I was very concerned about how I could do this book without falling into that trap. To me, it was that each instance of domestic abuse should be there in isolation to show what Cora is contending with, but it didn't need to be repeated. I hope that I've taken care of the reader. I know the first three chapters are a lot. But what kept me going as a writer was I knew what I was going to do with the book after those first three chapters, and also that I wasn't going to be asking the reader to endure that continually. There was going to be light as well.' A remarkably skilful novel, it almost certainly helped that – although Knapp may be a debut published novelist – The Names is far from her debut novel. It's been more than a quarter of a century since Knapp first started writing fiction, something her husband reminded her of recently when he found an old manuscript in a box of papers. 'It was from 1999,' she says, in a tone of wonderment. 'Twenty-six years!' Knapp, now 48, first began to dream of becoming a novelist when she was just a teenager. She has a deep and abiding love of fiction, and a particular respect for Irish authors, including Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín, Sally Rooney and Paul Murray. 'Irish fiction, the fiction I like, tends to be very quiet, but the books have huge emotional wallop,' she says. But after studying sociology at Southampton University, she became a secretary and had her two children, now aged 23 and 21, when she was in her mid-20s, putting thoughts of novel-writing largely on the back burner. It was in the crafting world where Knapp first came to public attention with a blog, Flossie Teacakes, which became popular in sewing circles, and then with her non-fiction book, Flossie Teacakes' Guide to English Paper Piecing, published in 2018, which explored fussy cutting and English Paper Piecing, a technique where fabric is wrapped around shapes made of thin cardboard. The crafting community suited Knapp, even if her blog name didn't: the moniker 'Flossie Teacakes' had been a private joke with her sister about her love of the Hunter Davies children's books, and she had never imagined anyone would actually read the blog. 'The quilting community to me feels uniquely warm and gorgeous and embracing,' she says. 'I didn't have a sense of, 'Oh, I'm being read.' It felt more like, 'I'm part of a community, like sitting around someone's kitchen table.'' But her non-fiction success didn't take the desire to publish a novel away. In 2019, an agent agreed to represent a manuscript from Knapp, but the book didn't make it to publication. It felt like one door was closing and another was opening at the same time — Florence Knapp 'I did find that hard,' she says. With The Names, 'after the experience of 2019, I felt like I [couldn't] have too much hope. I hadn't expected it to find a publisher or an agent. I knew I had to keep writing novels, but I couldn't quite believe it could actually happen after I'd been rejected.' Much to her surprise, a bevy of agents were keen to sign up the manuscript, and she went with Karolina Sutton at CAA, with whom she worked on the manuscript over several months. 'She sent it out in September. It was sent out on a Friday and we were hearing from people on the Saturday. We met publishers and with US publishers over Zoom over two weeks. It was a very intense, extraordinary two weeks.' Now that her book is making such waves, how does she feel? 'Incredibly uncomfortable!' she says, with a smile. 'I would have thought that's probably true of most writers – you're writing fiction because you're more comfortable being the onlooker than the looked-at. I'm probably at my happiest just at home with my family. I really like my life and I wasn't looking for it to change in a big new way. I just wanted to write a book and for it to exist out in the world. My goal has always been to be traditionally published.' There's a neat synchronicity in the timing of it all. When Sutton sent out the manuscript to publishers, it was the same week that Knapp's youngest child was leaving home to go into higher education. A bittersweet time for any parent, Knapp's experience was leavened by the realisation that 26 years after she had started writing novels, her debut was going to be published. 'It felt like one door was closing and another was opening at the same time,' she says. The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Orion
Washington Post
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In Florence Knapp's dazzling debut, a name can change destiny
'A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,' according to the Biblical proverb. That reference is more to reputation than anything, but what if a name truly did determine the course of a life? That is the premise of Florence Knapp's dazzling first novel, which follows alternating narratives, each determined by the protagonist's name.
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love Groundhog Day and Russian Doll? These are the novels for you
Florence Knapp's first novel The Names, publishing this month, tells not one story but three. As it opens, a mother is preparing to take her newborn boy to formally register his name. Will it be Bear, as his older sister would like, her own choice of Julian, or Gordon, named after his controlling father? The universe pivots on the decision she makes. Knapp plaits together the three stories that follow to trace the three different worlds in which the boy grows to manhood. Think of it as Sliding Doors for nominative determinism. In this universe, at least, it is going like gangbusters. Described as 'the book of the fair' at Frankfurt two years ago, Knapp's publisher secured the rights in a 13-way auction and it's already due to appear in 20 languages. It is a prime example of a renewed interest in what might be called 'high-concept fiction'. Knapp, though, says that the first time she even heard the epithet was in a meeting with an agent after she'd finished writing her book. 'I looked it up when I came home, and even now, it still feels like a really intangible thing: something to do with a hook, and maybe something to do with structure?' She says she's not a science fiction reader, but her husband is an avid fan and she found herself fascinated when he talked to her about world-building in that genre. The idea for what became The Names first came to her in 2017 or 2018, but 'I'd written a completely different book in between that I thought would have more commercial appeal, and it never found a publisher. So when I was setting out to write this one, I didn't have a sense of it being a big idea at all: it was just the thing that, when I was faced with quite a lot of rejection, I kept coming back to.' The narrative structure was, she says, 'really helpful. I think I realised early on that I wanted to show, in a very crystallised way, those moments in a person's life that are formative. If I hadn't had that structure, it would have been quite amorphous for the reader.' Instead, she says, 'it felt like stepping stones. OK, I just need to get to the next place, and then the next place …' 'High concept' is a tricky notion to define, but you know it when you see it. It's a story with a ready-made elevator pitch; a grabby gimmick in the narrative or world-building that can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Another recent example is last year's hit debut The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a story about refugees finding their feet in London, but the refugees are from other eras rather than other countries. And probably the hottest piece of translated fiction since Knausgård, Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, announces early on: 'Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November.' Think the classic movie Groundhog Day, or the TV show Russian Doll, in which Natasha Lyonne's character relives her 36th birthday party over and over – only with a Danish antiquarian bookseller and an International Booker shortlisting. There are two accounts you could offer of why these stories are popular now, one of them cynical, one of them less so. There's a bit of truth in both. The cynical one is that high-concept books are much easier to get past marketing meetings. A novel with a gimmick sticks in the mind. Its fanbase can sell it on TikTok – 'it's High School Musical – but with giant crabs!' – and buyers at bookshops will remember that book with the cool premise in the absence of a marquee author name. The less cynical version is that these books find readers because they use their MacGuffins to deft literary effect – and because a public that used to be sniffy about genre fiction is coming to appreciate its imaginative possibilities. The novelist Jenny Colgan describes the increased appetite for high-concept fiction as a sign that readers are 'getting over their prejudices to discover how many amazing worlds there are out there'. As she puts it, 'sci-fi is just shorthand for using certain tropes – time travel, rockets, apocalypse – to tell the kind of story you are telling: a love story, or a story about sadness or loss. And some of those work very well but loads sink without trace.' The vital ingredient, she argues, is quality. 'If you do something brilliantly you can smash through people's genre walls.' The Names is perfectly pitched between so-called literary and popular fiction, full of heart, and works out its premise compellingly. Meanwhile Bradley's book is consistently funny and inventive, and crackles at the level of the sentence: the fun the author is having is contagious. And Balle explores her world absorbingly; the generative idea at the heart of it grips the reader's imagination from the off. The same was true of those high-concept books that broke through in recent years: Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (an alternate-realities precursor to The Names, spliced in with a touch of Groundhog Day); Audrey Niffenegger's time-jumbled romance The Time Traveler's Wife; Naomi Alderman's The Power (what if, overnight, women were a physical threat to men rather than vice versa?) and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, to name just a few. Kaliane Bradley, who is both a publisher (she's an editor at Penguin) and a novelist, says she sees a high-concept pitch as 'an easy way into something that might be more complex or with multiple strands'. She uses the example of Dracula: 'There's a mysterious foreigner, and it's partly about fear of the immigrant, and it's about nervousness around female sexuality … but the high-concept pitch is: 'It's a guy who sucks your blood.'' She thinks the present boom is attributable to a 'certain loosening around the boundaries of genre' which has made people less anxious about approaching a book through a keynote idea: 'There was perhaps a time when people would have been only attracted by that or only put off by it.' She says she wrote her own high-concept novel by accident. 'I thought my first novel would be a big literary book about Cambodia,' she says. The Ministry of Time began as a jeu d'esprit to amuse Bradley's friends, 'and the conceit was: what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer, because we were all very into polar exploration, lived in your house? That's it. That's the concept […] The very first version was almost an experiment, really, and then it turned into a book by mistake.' She adds: 'The difference between this book and the book that I was writing that's now in a bottom drawer, is that one I felt like I had to take very seriously, and I had a real obligation to write. Whereas for this, it was just like: this is a fun idea. What if I just mess around with it? I realise it's different for every writer, but for me, that was just the more fertile way of thinking about writing.' The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Phoenix (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Scottish Sun
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Win a copy of The Names by Florence Knapp in this week's Fabulous book competition
DAZZLING READ Win a copy of The Names by Florence Knapp in this week's Fabulous book competition WHEN Cora comes to register her son's birth, she hesitates when asked what his name should be. Her abusive husband Gordon has decreed he should be named after him, while their daughter has requested Bear, and Cora herself would like Julian. Advertisement 1 10 lucky Fabulous readers will win a copy of this new novel in this week's book competition This harrowing but beautiful Sliding Doors story looks at what happens in each scenario. 10 lucky Fabulous readers will win a copy of this new novel in this week's book competition. To win a copy, enter using the form below by 11:59pm on May 17, 2025. For full terms and conditions, click here. Advertisement
