Forthcoming · Contemporary fiction
All God’s Kids
Three couples find their lives entwined as they each face social and sexual dilemma.
The story
Bridget Rawnsley has spent twenty years building a life she is proud of. In the space of a single night, someone takes it apart, and what grows out of the wreckage is the child she had almost stopped hoping for.
Then Bridget is attacked. She reports it, and finds that reporting it costs her almost as much as the attack did: the examination, the questions asked in a tone that makes her feel like the accused, the sense of a machine grinding on without her. Worn down, she withdraws the charges. Weeks later she discovers she is pregnant. Her husband made love to her on the morning before the rape, and she does not know whether her husband or the rapist is the biological father.
Her private crisis pulls in two other households on the same half-mile of road: a much older husband who has made his wife an offer most marriages would not survive, and a young probationary constable whose ambition and whose marriage are pulling in opposite directions. A nurse Bridget meets in a scanning room stirs feelings she has not allowed herself since she was a teenager. And in a delivery suite across the county, a devoutly Catholic midwife is waiting for a piece of paper that will test everything he believes about telling the truth.
What happens next is the reason the book exists.
What you can expect
A story that refuses to make its people simple
Nobody in this novel is only one thing, and the book declines to tell you who to condemn.
Procedure written by somebody who was there
The arrest, the interview room, the crown court. The detail comes from a career, not from research.
A page-turner built on private questions
Whose child is this? What is owed to a marriage? When is a lie the kinder act?
Who the book is for
Not everybody, and deliberately so. The novel is frank, it refuses to simplify its people, and it takes its time with the law. Readers who tend to get on with it look like this.
Readers of contemporary British drama
If you read novels that stay at kitchen-table level: money, marriages, work, the neighbours. This is that book with the volume turned up.
Readers who want the law in their fiction
The investigation and the courtroom are given room to breathe, written from inside the job by a former police officer.
Readers who prefer complication to instruction
The novel puts consent, faith, fidelity and fatherhood in one room and lets them argue. It does not hand down a verdict on its people.
Readers who are not easily shocked
It is frank about sex and unflinching about sexual violence. It was written for adults and makes no apology for that.
Themes
- Consent What a person did or did not agree to
- Fatherhood Who a child actually belongs to
- Marriage The bargains couples make in private
- Faith A conscience with rules attached
- Desire Feelings that do not ask permission first
- Belonging The word that gives the book its title
Details
- Author
- Joe Hartwell
- Category
- Contemporary fiction
- Length
- 94,627 words
- Language
- English
- Readership
- Adult
- Status
- Forthcoming
ISBN, publisher, page count and publication date will be listed here once they are confirmed. They are left blank rather than guessed.
Every baby who is born, no matter how he, or she, is conceived, and however they arrive, they are all children of God.
All God’s Kids
Ready when you are.
Ninety-four thousand words, sixty-one chapters, three families and one christening they all end up at.