In the opening pages of Florence Knapp’s powerful debut novel The Names, her lead character Cora is faced with a dilemma. Her husband wants to call their new baby Gordon, after him and his father before him. Cora does not want to name the child Gordon. Not simply because she doesn’t like the name, but because she is afraid the name will somehow contribute to her beautiful new baby emulating his father. Cora only hints at it in that exact moment, but subsequent pages make it clear: Gordon Atkin is not a nice man.
Although he is a doctor and respected in the community, at home, Cora and her nine-year-old daughter Maia live in fear of Gordon’s every move: he is controlling, unpredictable and violent. So, in 1987, at the registrar’s office, Cora makes a decision that will shape the rest of their lives: she gives her baby his name.
Three different narratives spin off in parallel from that moment. As the novel unfolds, we find out what happens if the child is called Gordon, after his father; or Julian, Cora’s chosen name for him; or Bear, his sister’s hoped-for name for him. Each decision has enormous consequences, because, in the coercive control situation Cora is in, no decision is small.
“I’ve always been interested in the things that shape us as people,” Knapp says, describing the roots of the novel over a video call from her home near London. “Whether that’s our upbringing or our circumstances or the people we’re friends with, or just those moments where something that’s meant to be an innocuous, small thing happens, but it lodges in our psyche and becomes a far bigger thing. To me, a name felt at the root of all that, because we’re given it at birth, and then carry it through the whole of our lives with us.”
The naming device is a clever route into the issue of domestic abuse and its effects on a wife and family. No decision that Cora makes can be the correct one; whether she defies Gordon or obeys him, as long as she remains in their home, she is at his mercy. When Cora names her boy Bear, the first thing she does on returning home is to put him in his Moses basket and hide him in her closet, to protect him from the anger she knows is coming. When Cora names him Gordon, her depression mounts to such an extent that she feels detached from her own body and cannot bond with him. When Cora names him Julian, the narrative jumps to Ireland, where Cora’s mother Sílbhe must take care of the children because something awful has happened to Cora: she has disappeared from her own narrative.
The book is devastating to read, as early reviews have acknowledged: plaudits have poured in from authors including JoJo Moyes, Marian Keyes and Ann Napolitano. In Britain, the book was snapped up by Orion after a 13-way auction and in the United States after a 10-way auction; it is being translated into more than 20 languages.
Clad in a simple black top, her hair scraped back, and positioned at her laptop in front of a dark green library full of books, Knapp is nervous at the prospect of doing interviews and becoming a more public person. She has been deeply moved by the responses to the book. “The thing that has really shocked me is how many people I’ve heard from who have said that this has been their situation or upbringing,” she says. “It means a lot to me to hear from people, but I feel so sad that it feels so familiar and real to people.”
It’s perhaps not coincidental that the idea for the novel came to Knapp during Covid, a time when 5km travel restrictions were in place in many regions, effectively trapping sufferers of domestic abuse in their homes.
In 2020, Knapp was part of an online Royal Literary Fund community reading group that happened to have a worker from a women’s refuge log on to speak to them as part of their course. “She told us the details of her job and I found it really hard not to close the lid of the laptop,” Knapp says, “because it made me feel like crying and I was embarrassed to be seen crying in front of her when that was the reality of her job. The things I’d heard: I couldn’t get them out of my mind. On an emotional level, I [wanted] to write to gain an understanding.”
As with Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, or Adolescence, the Netflix show about the murder of a teenager, Knapp was conscious of the delicacy and the enormity of the task, the need to balance light and shade. “What’s often used in entertainment is a woman being scared, and I was very concerned about how I could do this book without falling into that trap. To me, it was that each instance of domestic abuse should be there in isolation to show what Cora is contending with, but it didn’t need to be repeated. I hope that I’ve taken care of the reader. I know the first three chapters are a lot. But what kept me going as a writer was I knew what I was going to do with the book after those first three chapters, and also that I wasn’t going to be asking the reader to endure that continually. There was going to be light as well.”
A remarkably skilful novel, it almost certainly helped that – although Knapp may be a debut published novelist – The Names is far from her debut novel. It’s been more than a quarter of a century since Knapp first started writing fiction, something her husband reminded her of recently when he found an old manuscript in a box of papers. “It was from 1999,” she says, in a tone of wonderment. “Twenty-six years!”
Knapp, now 48, first began to dream of becoming a novelist when she was just a teenager. She has a deep and abiding love of fiction, and a particular respect for Irish authors, including Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín, Sally Rooney and Paul Murray. “Irish fiction, the fiction I like, tends to be very quiet, but the books have huge emotional wallop,” she says. But after studying sociology at Southampton University, she became a secretary and had her two children, now aged 23 and 21, when she was in her mid-20s, putting thoughts of novel-writing largely on the back burner.
It was in the crafting world where Knapp first came to public attention with a blog, Flossie Teacakes, which became popular in sewing circles, and then with her non-fiction book, Flossie Teacakes’ Guide to English Paper Piecing, published in 2018, which explored fussy cutting and English Paper Piecing, a technique where fabric is wrapped around shapes made of thin cardboard. The crafting community suited Knapp, even if her blog name didn’t: the moniker “Flossie Teacakes” had been a private joke with her sister about her love of the Hunter Davies children’s books, and she had never imagined anyone would actually read the blog.
“The quilting community to me feels uniquely warm and gorgeous and embracing,” she says. “I didn’t have a sense of, ‘Oh, I’m being read.’ It felt more like, ‘I’m part of a community, like sitting around someone‘s kitchen table.’” But her non-fiction success didn’t take the desire to publish a novel away. In 2019, an agent agreed to represent a manuscript from Knapp, but the book didn’t make it to publication.
It felt like one door was closing and another was opening at the same time
— Florence Knapp
“I did find that hard,” she says. With The Names, “after the experience of 2019, I felt like I [couldn’t] have too much hope. I hadn’t expected it to find a publisher or an agent. I knew I had to keep writing novels, but I couldn’t quite believe it could actually happen after I’d been rejected.”
Much to her surprise, a bevy of agents were keen to sign up the manuscript, and she went with Karolina Sutton at CAA, with whom she worked on the manuscript over several months. “She sent it out in September. It was sent out on a Friday and we were hearing from people on the Saturday. We met publishers and with US publishers over Zoom over two weeks. It was a very intense, extraordinary two weeks.”
Now that her book is making such waves, how does she feel? “Incredibly uncomfortable!” she says, with a smile. “I would have thought that’s probably true of most writers – you’re writing fiction because you’re more comfortable being the onlooker than the looked-at. I’m probably at my happiest just at home with my family. I really like my life and I wasn’t looking for it to change in a big new way. I just wanted to write a book and for it to exist out in the world. My goal has always been to be traditionally published.”
There’s a neat synchronicity in the timing of it all. When Sutton sent out the manuscript to publishers, it was the same week that Knapp’s youngest child was leaving home to go into higher education. A bittersweet time for any parent, Knapp’s experience was leavened by the realisation that 26 years after she had started writing novels, her debut was going to be published. “It felt like one door was closing and another was opening at the same time,” she says.
- The Names by Florence Knapp is published by Orion
