raw content

‘raw content is a work of dark, aching beauty. This is the side of new motherhood we’re still learning to speak: violent, tender, clarified - and ringing with determination and love. No one writes about landscape and the body the way that Booth does, and no one captures the strange lines of connection that run between them with such visceral precision. Brimming with Booth’s love of language and literature, and her irrevocable knack for revealing us to ourselves’ * Helen Jukes, author of Mother Animal *A stunning mix of horror and tenderness, love and despair. It’s rare to see such a raw and real account of early motherhood – Kirsty Logan, author of The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood MemoirI have loved Naomi Booth’s work for a long time. In her brilliant new novel, raw content, Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are the ghosts that haunt Grace’s youth, but it is the land itself that remains pregnant with dread, the empty mills and the rushing rivers both poignant and alive – Heather Parry, author of Carrion CrowIn this small but powerful novel a harsh and haunted Northern landscape mirrors the fears and fragilities of a new mother as she gradually discovers new ways of living - and of loving – Alice Jolly, author of The Matchbox Girl‘A luminous and visceral novel about new motherhood. Booth skillfully portrays a young woman’s unravelling against the backdrop of a grittily beautiful Yorkshire landscape. No other novel has explored the terrifying and joyful transformations of parenthood with such dazzling power’ * Abi Curtis, author of The Headland *‘Beautifully written, honest and gritty’ * The Sun *

Naomi Booth is the author of the short story collection Animals at Night as well as the novels Exit Management and Sealed (all Dead Ink Books). Sealed is optioned by Erin Richards who is currently working on a script. Exit Management was listed as a Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2020 and Animals at Night was shortlisted for the 2023 Edge Hill Prize, winning the ‘Reader’s Choice’ award. Naomi’s other short fiction has been listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize and anthologised in Best British Short Stories. Her story, ‘Sour Hall’, first published in Virago’s 2020 collection Hag, was adapted into an Audible Originals drama series. Naomi grew up in West Yorkshire and now lives in York. She is an Associate Professor at Durham University, and also writes academic prose, including her recent, brilliantly reviewed, monograph on the literary history of swooning, Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out.

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