So, some news.
I’ve a new book coming next Spring. It’s called Hark: How Women Listen, and it’s a story about sound and searching for meaning. It’s about what happens when you lose a sense of who you are, and try to connect all the different selves you may have been. It’s a book that I made when I was at my most broken, and it’s a book that I wrote to try and put those parts of me back together.
Hark has taken me to the Arctic Circle in the 19th century, when people listened out for the unlikely crackle of the Aurora Borealis, and to the hulking, lonely monuments of the Sound Mirrors in Denge. I have delved into anechoic chambers and bathed in sound in the Mojave desert. More vitally, I have spoken with incredible women; translators who keep our country safe, Deaf performers who have changed how our creative landscape looks and octogenarian artists who are still wading into rivers to inhabit their sound.
But this book is – and it still surprises me to acknowledge this – also my most personal work yet. I sold Hark four days before I gave birth, and now I have a toddler who can sing ‘Baby Shark’. And so perhaps it was always going to be a book about transitions; of what happens when society says your life is going to change, but you have no understanding of how. It is also a story that sets itself in hospital corridors and playgroups, in the lonely, half-light depths of the night and the strange illusions the mind can conjure.
Recently, I was asked by my publisher to explain who the book was for. I tend to try and write with the reader out of the room, so to speak; I can only really engage with what I’m thinking and the words on the page, which is why it’s always a quiet amazement when people respond to what I write. But after some thought, I told them that Hark was a book for those who have been through a change in their life and not known how to feel afterwards. It’s a book for women who don’t feel heard. And it’s a book for people who want to listen better – to the world, to their loved ones and, crucially, to themselves.
Hark, How Women Listen will be released on April 24, 2025, and it is very much available for pre-order now. I can’t overestimate how valuable pre-orders are to a book’s life - they decide everything from marketing budgets and how many copies a bookshop decides to stock to international translations and the chances of appearing on a bestseller’s list. In short, if you feel like Hark might be a book you’d like to read, ordering it now will make a massive difference - to it, and to me. If you’re a library user, you can request that your library pre-orders too!
more on listening
kitchen music
Kitchen dancing needs kitchen music. Motown is fantastic kitchen music - all soul and feeling and rhythm; when M first heard me sing it was to ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ while washing up, hungover.
lover
The song is among those I have a near-muscular memory of, I find my own voice ratcheting through his glissando vocals, my fingers twitching at a ghostly harmonium.
karaoke
This was the last song, and I chose it. This was my last work Christmas Party in 13 years. I sat on the bus on the way home, thinking about getting a McDonalds, and knowing that I will miss them.
Congrats! The biggest of congrats on everything surrounding the book as well as the book itself. I’m in the midst of doing some pretty hefty finding the pieces and gluing them back together myself. It isn’t easy. Your book comes out 1 day after the three year anniversary of the head injury that broke me. I hope by then it’ll serve as postcards from a place rather than an instruction manual of sorts, but either way, looking forward to it.
Gorgeous 😌 I can tell this is going to be another all enveloping journey that I'll get completely swept up in. Will of course pre order, from my local. Congratulations, Alice! X