My Next Book!

I've just finished writing and editing another book. It's a surreal collection of short - sometimes extremely short - stories and I've called it Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood. I have decided to publish this one in a different way, in collaboration with Breakthrough Books, a new Cornwall-based collective committed to transparency and creative freedom for its authors. You can pre-order a first edition paperback from their website here. In doing so, you will be assisting with printing costs and making sure the book's artist and editors are paid promptly. Because fairness to everyone involved is vitally important to Breakthrough, and it's vitally important to me.

I'll be sending out the books myself from my house when they come back from the printers in September. You'll see that there's an option of a signed edition, and a limited number of earlybird copies that come with a free handmade linoprint bookmark by my mum, Jo.

Here's a sneak preview of one of the stories.

The fabulous cover, which you can see above, is by Joe McLaren, who illustrated the covers of Help The Witch, Villager, 1983 and Everything Will Swallow You. Joe has also provided a small illustration for each of the 57 stories in the book (sample below).

What is Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood about? You'll encounter a surprisingly erudite badger, the regional manager for primordial evil in the South West of the UK, a magical stone that reveals people's true identities, an eccentric bookshop owner who ages in multiples of seven, a moorland pixie adjusting to a new more domestic kind of life and an estate agent selling a house on behalf of the most unusual of clients. The characters in the stories are diverse but what they have in common is that they all live in a topsy turvy shadow version of our own world. When I am on a walk in the countryside and see a magical hole in a rock or an abandoned lime kiln or a hollow tree, the setting of Curious Events is the place I imagine as being beyond it, just out of reach, but always palpable.

Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood is a short book - more relentlessly silly and less structurally ambitious than my last few - but it was exactly what I needed to write after my third novel Everything Will Swallow You and I had huge fun with it. In a way, it's my attempt to make my own magical portal for readers that simulates the ones I find in the countryside. A place where the daily frustrations and injustices of 2026 can be briefly left behind. It probably wouldn't exist in quite the same way if I'd never read Richard Brautigan's Revenge Of The Lawn, or the stories of Grace Paley, or Without Feathers, or the books George Saunders wrote at the beginning of of this century, but it's entirely my own. It's not "folk horror" and it's not me trying to write a book that's like anyone else's book (even though I sometimes get the feeling from the publishing industry that that's what it wants me to do). If my sixteenth book does have a genre, that genre is 'Me'.

Repeatedly, for many years, publishers and agents have told me that short stories "don't sell". Whether this is true or not (and the careers of Claire Keegan and Jhumpa Lahiri, to name just two, strongly argue that it isn't) I believe that short stories should be valued and that how "marketable" they are should not come into it. Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood is not just my second collection, following 2018's Shirley Jackson Award-winning Help The Witch; it's my stubborn defence of the short story in an attention-sapped era which, illogically, seems to want to forsake it as an art form. It's me replying to a world that's saying "You should write this - it will make more money" by saying "No, actually I'm going to write this thing I have a burning need to write instead."

When Swift Press, the publishers of my latest novel, told me they wanted another novel from me but didn't want to publish a collection of short stories, I had a few options. I could have sent the Curious Events manuscript to another traditional publisher. I didn't do that. I could have crowdfunded it and put it out myself. I didn't do that, either, partly because I feel wary of the crowdfunding method since the 2025 collapse of my former publishers Unbound, which left readers and authors, including me, thousands of pounds out of pocket. Instead, I've chosen to collaborate with Breakthrough Books, which was founded by a group of ex-Unbound authors who wanted to put together a system that treats writers more equitably than publishers like Unbound have done in the past. There's no advance, no "target". I send the books out myself. Those books will, hopefully, be making their way into a few shops too. It's a smaller way of doing things. But the profit share is extremely fair. By ordering a copy in advance you'll be helping to cover our costs. But whatever the case, the book is done, will soon be on its way to the printers, and will be arriving on your doorstep in September.

Thanks for reading this and - to those of you who do place an order - for helping me get another weird book out into the world.

Tom

Pre-order a copy of Curious Events Lately Occurring In Your Neighbourhood from the Breakthrough Books website for September here.

Grab one of the final remaining signed paperbacks of my latest novel Everything Will Swallow You here from Blackwell's - with free international delivery - here.