Hurray! Notebook Is Republished Today!

Tom Cox

23 Apr 2026 — 10 min read

I write this morning in a bit of pharmaceutically suppressed pain, due to a fractured jaw sustained during some extremely tricky dental surgery, but feeling positive about spring, creativity, my new home by the sea and a bit of good news: After well over a year out of print, my shortest book, Notebook, is being republished today. You can order it here from Blackwell's UK with free international delivery.

The idea for Notebook began to materialise in 2018, when my rucksack was stolen from beside a dancefloor in Bristol. My wallet and phone and other valuables were in the rucksack but the loss that proved most painful was a notebook containing almost a year of thoughts, observations, ideas and diary entries. I made a resolution: my next notebook would be the best I'd ever written and I would not let it out of my sight. Around this time I also read two extremely strange short books from the 1970s, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler's Speedboat, both of which felt like uniquely intimate, somewhat hallucinatory glimpses into their authors' minds. These feverish diary-memoir hybrids confirmed something I'd long suspected: it WAS actually possible to write a book about nothing and make it addictively readable. Collating almost a decade's worth of highlights from my notebooks (omitting those that had already appeared in my other books, or been lost forever in Bristol), Notebook became a provincially British modern day response to Hardwick and Adler, fashioned into an abstract narrative of sorts. It came out in 2021 but in 2024 became a casualty of the demise of Unbound. Today it becomes the final of my six Unbound books to be republished by Swift Press.

The two comments I hear most frequently about Notebook are "It got me into reading again after the Internet broke my brain" and "It was my gateway to the rest of your books." It's certainly not the most ambitious bit of work I've ever done but I had great fun putting it together and, six years down the line from finishing it, find myself planning its sequel. I have included a few excerpts from Notebook below and, for those here who are new to my writing, a little guide to some of my other books...

Tom

I’m extremely pro purchasing new notebooks but extremely anti wasting paper. It causes me to lead quite a turbulent life, full of internal conflict. Sure, sex is great but have you ever cracked open a new notebook and written something on the opening page with a really nice pen? I will always be seduced by new notebooks because there perennially exists the possibility that the next notebook could be The One.
I went for a haircut at a new place. After my haircut, the hairdresser fetched my duffle coat from the coat rack in the corner of the room. Friends and family had frequently slagged off the duffle coat, which had been very old even when I’d purchased it from a charity shop for £12 over a decade earlier, and I am pretty sure wearing it had once scuppered my chance of renting a house via a particularly judgemental estate agent. I’d been considering letting it go for a couple of years, but - mostly out of my customary desire to fly in the face of popular opinion - hadn’t quite been able to bring myself to do it. All I had in the pockets were my phone and £1.52, but I saw the hairdresser’s knees buckle an inch or two under the duffle coat’s weight as he took it from the peg. ‘Don’t forget your carpet, sir!’ he said, handing it to me.
Ageing: the condition of becoming less serious about all you were once far too serious about and more serious about all that you once undervalued.
This afternoon I decided to do my shopping at the supermarket where the cheery old man who looks like a tipsy druid works. Sadly the cheery old man who looks like a tipsy druid wasn’t there on this occasion. I noticed the guy ahead of me in the queue was buying just two items: a miniature brandy and a pork pie. ‘Clive, do not fuck off down the wine aisle!’ said a woman to another man, a few yards away.
Birdsong is something that can be a vital part of your well-being for years without you noticing or appreciating it, like having intact internal organs.
Isn’t it amazing the way life can seem too short and intrinsically
magical, yet at the same time feel like a long, uphill road, potholed
with fuckwits.
Overheard train chat between two tough-looking youths:
Youth one: “I got déjà vu, man. I saw this dog and felt like I’d seen it before.”
Youth two: “That’s not déjà vu. You just saw a dog twice.”
My friend Chloe, who lives in the Mendips, lost her hen. A neighbour telephoned to say the hen had been spotted at Wookey Hole, the subterranean tourist hotspot down the road, which, in addition to its world-famous caves and alleged witch, boasts such tourist attractions as a vintage penny arcade, an animatronic dinosaur valley and a pirate zap zone. By the time Chloe arrived, the hen had reached the crazy golf course, popularly known as Pirate Island. It was a busy bank holiday at the caves, and as Chloe chased the hen across the crazy golf course, lunging for the hen, and the hen repeatedly eluded her grasp, tourists attempted to get selfies with the hen. After much chasing between the holes – both those designed by nature, and those designed by the crazy golf course’s architects – with little help from the tourists, Chloe caught the hen, and returned it to her garden, where two weeks later it was devoured by a fox.
“Take your shoes off and throw them in the lake.” That’s easy for Kate Bush to say. She’s probably got loads of shoes and much easier access to her nearest lake than I have.

Some other books by me you might want to try:

Villager is where I'd advise you to start if you wanted to read one of my novels. It's also the one people most frequently tell me they reread. It's set on a fictional moor which just happens to be in the exact place Dartmoor is in the real world (I'd written so much about the history and folklore of the real moor in my non-fiction I thought it would be a more interesting challenge to invent my own here, and it was) and covers almost two centuries of life in and around one village, connected by a lost record and a ghostly legend or two. It was my attempt to write a story that's psychedelic in the same way some of my favourite records are psychedelic. Comments I've had about it include "It did my fucking head in, in that best possible way." EXTRACT HERE.

21st-Century Yokel (EXTRACT HERE) is not a bad place to start with my non-fiction. It's a combination of memoir, social history, humour, wildlife and at least six or seven other things. I think Ring The Hill (EXTRACT HERE), the non-fiction book that came after it, is a bit better, but Yokel is arguably more anarchic and possibly has a few more laughs. You'd probably like both if you like walking, rivers, hills, scarecrows or the sea and don't hate animals.

1983 is my second and most autobiographical novel. It's not the book you'll probably think it is after reading the first couple of chapters. It's a little less dense and more daft than Villager but has a similarly polyphonic nature, with a multi-voiced narrative telling the story of one year in a Nottinghamshire mining village not dissimilar to the one I spent the first decade of my life in. I loved living inside it and missed it terribly when I finished it. Someone called it "Stranger Things rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut and Sue Townsend" but I don't know if that's true. It's probably more "me rewritten by me". It was arguably the biggest casualty of the demise of Unbound, since the hardback came out just as the shit was hitting the fan, but I feel marginally confident that it will finally find its true audience 60-70 years after I am dead. EXTRACT HERE.

Help The Witch is a wintry collection of short stories I wrote in a snowy high-up place as 2017 turned into 2018. It won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing Award, which always amuses me a bit, since I'm far too much of a wuss to do any actual horror writing. I'd call it more "unsettling and spooky" than "scary" and some of the blurbs you'll see about it online, referencing MR James, are probably a bit misleading, since they were written by my ex-publishers before the book was written and they realised I'm nowhere near that serious and had spent the previous autumn reading Grace Paley and Ian Frazier. It was kind of an experiment where I asked myself, "Can the atmosphere of the building you're writing a book in leak into the book itself?" The answer: yes. EXTRACT HERE.

Everything Will Swallow You is my most recent novel, and - I believe - my best. It was certainly the one I found most exhausting and rewarding to write. All the mountains I made for myself during its creation ended up being what rewarded me most but also what makes it really really hard to summarise. To put it briefly it's about an antique dealer who lives with a semi-aquatic creature who many people mistake for a dog but is in the deeper sense extremely undoglike and doesn't even get on with dogs. It's also about Dorset, Cornwall, the differences between the 20th-Century and the 21st, the power of old objects, and how we turn facts into folklore (and how future generations might do the same). You can read extracts of it here and here. I do have just a few signed hardbacks of it here, available to readers in the UK with a free linoprint bookmark made by my mum, Jo, so if you'd like one of those please drop me an email via the contact form on tom-cox.com.

These books - which are now reavailable, and which, after a tough couple of years, I will now once again earn money from - were all written between 2016 and now, the period after I stopped trying to shape myself into what I thought publishers wanted and started to do my own thing. Immediately prior to that I wrote two "cats and more" memoirs which I'm still very proud of, and have a not dissimilar voice and feel to the one found in my more recent non-fiction. In some ways, they're just books about the loud, excitable behaviour of my dad, disguised as books about animals. The Good, The Bad And The Furry came out in October 2013 and went straight into the top ten Sunday Times Bestseller Chart. Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind came out two years later, and didn't sell quite as well. Which is baffling to me, since it's without question a marginally better book.

Prior to those two, I wrote two other "cats and more" books which definitely have their moments and definitely are about the life I lived but feel more obedient, more fearful, less free: Under The Paw (currently out of print) and Talk To The Tail. I also wrote a couple of books about golf, from the perspective of a frequently bemused, fundamentally ungolf sort of person who just happened to like hitting balls with a club: Nice Jumper, when I was about three and hadn't learned to write yet but had a lot of enthusiasm, and the slightly better Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia, from when I was a few years older. In between those I write two music books I'm not going to even name here because they're mostly shit and can most positively be looked at as "part of the learning process".

I have recently finished a new collection of short stories. And I'm getting excited about telling you about that, but will leave it for another day in the very near future.

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