Roxy Dunn interview

Video interview with Roxy Dunn, first time author of novel As Young As This, published by Penguin on 6th April 2023.

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah.

These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones - each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father the children she's always imagined in her future. From her first sexual encounter, to her first love, from grown-up dilemmas to spontaneous thrills, she's soaked up every experience available to her, discovering friendship, joy and despair.

As Young as This is a debut aimed at fans of Dolly Alderton, Meg Mason and Monica Heisey. Roxy is joined in conversation by literary journalist Alex Peake-Tomkinson as they delve into the ways that people shape us, the plans we make for our lives, and what it means to let go.

“A young woman’s life, told through the men she has dated. With glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by love.” Pandora Sykes

“Raw, funny and beautiful…a really gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhood.” Daisy Buchanan

Second Self by Chloe Ashby

Chloë Ashby’s thoughtful second novel focuses on fertility and the choices women in their thirties routinely face over motherhood. Cathy, the heroine, is married to Noah, who is around a decade older and has decided he doesn’t want children.

Mothers are everywhere in this book. There is Cathy’s best friend, her sister-in-law and her own widowed mother, Janey. Janey lives alone in Norfolk while Cathy – her only child – is in London; she appears to be slipping into dementia and this story line forms the other main strand of Second Self. Ashby implies that some of Cathy’s indecision over motherhood relates to the effective loss of her own mother to old age and disease.

Ashby writes with great fluency and is very confident in her evocations of Cathy and Noah’s middle-class milieu of Ottolenghi takeaways and almond bellinis. For all Cathy’s material comfort, however, this is not a smug novel, or a satire on smugness. There is plenty to fear here: infant mortality, Alzheimer’s, marital breakdown, ageing, death.