Big Nobody

a free extract from your new favourite novel

This is the UK jacket

I’m so excited to bring you this extract - Big Nobody is one of my favourite novels so far this year. This comes as no surprise to me whatsoever - Alex (who I knew a bit many eons ago - I once had dinner at her house with Tony Mortimer from East 17, hahaha, LIFE) was the features editor of Smash Hits in its glorious heyday. Smash Hits was and remains the funniest magazine ever to have existed, and she was at the epicentre of making it that way.

This is her first novel. I love to see a woman in her sixties with a first novel, let alone one this good.

It is 1975 and we’re in Leyton, east London. Constance Costa is 14, bright and funny, mouthy, full of swagger and anxiety and terrible hidden pain. She talks to the posters of the pop stars on her wall (David Bowie is brilliantly voiced).

She’s half Greek Cypriot, a cause of both comfort - kind aunties who aren’t really aunties - and intense mortification, a scenario familiar to any child of immigrants. Also, she wants to kill her dad. Literally. She hates him. She has good reason. She calls him The Fat Murderer.

The book is both hilariously funny - it made me literally bark with laughter - and intensely, heartbreakingly moving - the hardest of tricks to pull off, let alone with such aplomb and zip. It’s about teenagehood, identity, grief, family dynamics, abuse, buried trauma, but done in this completely fresh and original way. It’s also deeply nostalgic if you’re of a certain vintage. I can’t recommend it enough.

From Kirkus Review:

‘In mid-70s London, a young woman talks to her posters of Marc Bolan and David Bowie about her plans to murder her father […] There hasn’t been a novel this funny that contains an abuse plot since early Edward St. Aubyn, who’s a contemporary of Kadis, debuting in her 60s after a career in music journalism. She certainly hasn’t lost her grip on what it’s like to be 15: The way she keeps the darkest parts of the book burning hot behind Connie’s jokes, lists, nicknames, and wisecracks is both creatively daring and perfectly evocative of the melodramatic emotional shitshow that is adolescence’.

This is the US jacket

This is Alex. Bio: she grew up in Leyton and Walthamstow, East London. She studied English Literature at Goldsmiths University before embarking on a music journalism career. She was Features Editor at Smash Hits in its heyday (RIP) and has also written for various newspapers and magazines, including Sunday Times Style and Q Magazine. She then went into artist management and now works as a consultant in the music industry. Alex suffers from delusions of grandeur and still believes she will, one day, headline Wembley Stadium. Photo: Martin Savage

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I was going to extract the prologue and first chapter, but actually this chapter, which is chapter 3, gives you such a good sense of the book that I went with that instead. ENJOY.

9781529155303 Bignobody [ch3 Only]

99KB ∙ PDF file

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Here is Big Nobody on Bookshop (UK), on Bookshop (US), on Amazon (UK) and on Amazon (US), and here it is at Waterstones. It’s out now. And I’ve just discovered from the comments that Alex is on Substack, here.

Bowie and Bolan in the mid-Seventies

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Do please really kindly leave this post a ❤️ if you enjoyed it, thank you. And do subscribe if you don’t already and like this sort of thing. I’ll be back on Saturday with a bumper weekend supplement. And now I’m off to London (come and see me wang on about interiors tomorrow!), which actually is just as well as we’re having plumbing work and are therefore waterless for four days. No flushing loos. Quite bleak. This morning I considered abluting in the wild.