Vanessa Onwuemezi’s DARK NEIGHBOURHOOD Book Tour

Vanessa Onwuemezi Credit Elizabeth Wicks

13 October Short Story event with Lucie McKnight Hardy, Vanessa Onwuemezi and Sarah Schofield at Blackwell’s Manchester

16 October Short Story event with Vanessa Onwuemezi, Alice Ash and Gemma Seltzer at Burley Fisher Festival

21 October Common Ground: Friendship in the City of London: Vanessa Onwuemezi, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Naomi Ishiguro at London Literature Festival

25 October – Vanessa Onwuemezi and Kayo Chingonyi hosted by Pages of Hackney [digital event] Link TK.

27 October – The Giant Dark/Dark Neighbourhood: Dazzling New Fiction with Sarvat Hasin at Lighthouse Bookshop, Edinburgh

28 October Vanessa Onwuemezi and Shola Von Reinhold in conversation with Helen Charman at Mount Florida Books in Glasgow

Alice Hattrick’s ILL FEELINGS Book Tour

Alice Hattrick Credit Jacques Testard

16 SeptemberReading at Fitzcarraldo Editions x Bold Tendencies in Peckham.

23 September – Reading at Fitzcarraldo Editions x Storysmith in Bristol.

6 October – Alice Hattrick with Catriona Morton and Lucia Osborne-Crowley at Blackwell’s Manchester.

16 October – Alice Hattrick will be at Burley Fisher’s Fifth Anniversary Festival.

21 October Alice Hattrick x ACHE Magazine digital event.

22 October Alice Hattrick x Rebecca Birrell at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

11 November – Alice Hattrick in conversation with Lucia Osborne Crowley at Toppings Edinburgh. Link TK.

THE NAKED DON’T FEAR THE WATER by Matthieu Aikins

Matthieu Aikins credit: Kiana Hayeri

Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired Matthieu Aikins’ debut The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground, about Aikins’ journey undercover on the migrant trail from Kabul to Europe in 2016. Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish in February 2022, simultaneously with Harper in the US.

In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year. Matthieu Aikins, a journalist living in Kabul, decides to follow his friend. In order to do so, he must leave his own passport and identity behind to go underground on the refugee trail with Omar. Their odyssey across land and sea from Afghanistan to Europe brings them face to face with the people at heart of the migration crisis: smugglers, cops, activists, and the men, women and children fleeing war in search of a better life. As setbacks and dangers mount for the two friends, Matthieu is also drawn into the escape plans of Omar’s entire family, including Maryam, the matriarch who has fought ferociously for her children’s survival.

Matthieu Aikins is a journalist currently based in Kabul and has reported from Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2008. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and has won numerous honors, including the George Polk and Livingston awards. He is a past fellow at Type Media Center, New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin. Matthieu grew up in Nova Scotia, and has a master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is his first book.

EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard

photo credit: Barney Jones

Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish Daisy Hildyard’s second novel, Emergency in April 2022.

Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era. 

Emergency explores some of the ideas in fiction that Daisy Hildyard wrote about in her essay The Second Body, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. Her debut novel, Hunters in the Snow, came out with Jonathan Cape in 2013 and received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. She lives in York with her family.

Fitz Carraldo Editions