Naomi Booth was born and raised in West Yorkshire and is now based inYork, where she lectures in Creative Writing and Literature at York St John University.

But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger.With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child.

Surely their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their little family. Above all, Alice is haunted by the rumours of the skin sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city. With elements of speculative fiction and the macabre, this is also an unforgettable story about a mother’s fight to survive. Timely and suspenseful, Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood, a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies and from the world around them. No one said to us: God knows what will begin.’

No one said to us: beware of fresh starts. We came out here for the clear air and a fresh start. Titan, 14.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-78909-124-3. Naomi booth will be appearing at Durham Book Festival, interviewing authors Jessica Andrews and Natasha Brown.‘We came out here to begin again. Naomi is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. She has published two novels, Sealed, which was shortlisted for the Not the Booker Award 2018, and Exit Management, which was a Guardian Fiction Book of the year in 2020. Her first work of fiction The Lost Art of Sinking was published in 2015 and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella. Dead Ink’s aim is to introduce readers to books that are daring and challenging, from authors who may otherwise escape our notice. Her stories have been long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and anthologised in Best British Short Stories 2019. Sealed by Naomi Booth was one of the latest novels I have acquired from backing indie publisher Dead Ink’s ‘Publishing the Underground’ crowd funding campaign. Durham Book Festival and English PEN have commissioned acclaimed author and Durham University academic Naomi Booth, to write a piece exploring Violet Hunt’s extraordinary life. She went on to found both the Women’s Suffrage League and English PEN, as well as becoming a prolific writer and literary salon host. Violet Hunt was a writer born in Durham in 1862.

Sealed by naomi booth