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2 weeks ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Sophie Percival
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions, and we’re so happy to feature Luminous as our Book of the Month!First of all, I’d love to know how you found the experience of writing Luminous. What did you learn about your writing process, and did it change at all over time? Luminous began as a children’s book: a ragtag bunch of kids discover a robot named Yoyo in a junkyard. He looks like a twelve-year-old boy, but turns out to be so much more.
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3 weeks ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Sophie Percival
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions! We loved Idle Grounds so much and are so happy to be promoting it to our readers. (That’s so lovely to hear—thank you!)First of all, I’d love to know more about the process of writing Idle Grounds. Where did your initial idea come from? And how does it feel to be a debut novelist? Idle Grounds is based on my childhood in New England, so it’s very much a write what you know kind of thing.
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1 month ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Isobel Edmondson |Sophie Percival
What are you most excited about when it comes to the launch of your new book: We Need Your Art? I'm excited for We Need Your Art to go out there and start changing people's lives. For my book baby to go have a life of her own, inspiring people to create, taking care of artists who are hurting, gently nudging people back to their art. This lead up has been so intense, and I have championed this book with my whole heart. It is time for the book to start working her magic.
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1 month ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Kaya Purchase |Sophie Percival
Firstly, I want to congratulate you on the novel. It’s such an important piece of work in terms of how it grapples with ecological themes and the human experience. It feels like the most accurate representation of climate anxiety at this specific point in history that I’ve read. This is a novel about grief and confronting the truth of mortality, but the narrator’s personal experiences of grief serve as a microcosm for the collective grief we all feel right now for a collapsing planet.
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2 months ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles |Sophie Percival
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. We’re so happy to have The Other Valley as our March Book of the Month!With The Other Valley's release in the UK this month, I’d love to know how your experience as a debut author has been so far and how it feels to know your novel is being read around the world? First, thanks so much for choosing The Other Valley as your book of the month! I appreciate the international angle of your question.
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2 months ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Sian Dennis |Sophie Percival
“This book is for my mother, who lives in every line,” Chelsea Bieker writes in the dedication to her second novel, Madwoman, alongside a candid photo of her own mother. It’s a disarmingly intimate opening that sets the tone for a blistering journey through the complexities of motherhood, the art of survival, and the painful legacies we inherit.
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2 months ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles |Sophie Percival
First, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me! To start, could you tell me about the origins of The Alternatives? Thank you so much for picking it as your book of the month! And for the gorgeous review! And for chatting with me about it now. I never know what a book will be from the outset, but I started out with this boomy, funny, heartsore geologist character, Olwen. She came to me on the west coast of Ireland in a place called Connemara, where I wrote a lot of the book.
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Jan 30, 2025 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Emily Goulding |Sophie Percival
Catherine Airey’s Confessions follows three generations of women moving from Ireland to New York, and it was a book that I simply didn’t want to end. It opens with Cora Brady, stranded in New York in September 2001 after she loses her father to 9/11. When she receives a letter from her estranged aunt in rural Ireland inviting her to come and stay, her family history begins to unspool, revealing generations of unspoken history and secrets. I could barely believe how good this book was.
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Kate Hopkins |Sophie Percival
Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel follows the acclaimed short-story collection Objects of Desire. It explores a young woman’s fraught coming of age and an unusual friendship between sixteen-year-old Eva and Jamie, who meet by chance. She comes from Brooklyn and is the child of liberal middle-class parents; he has grown up in Manhattan in a family as dysfunctional as it is wealthy. Their backgrounds could not be more different.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Lara Toffanello |Sophie Percival
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out. An extraordinary debut about the daughter of Afghan refugees growing up between the silverfish-infested public housing of Berlin and the drug-fuelled nightclubs of its underground, Good Girl is a novel charged with soul and defiance. Although the novel often uses quite elaborate vocabulary and terminology, making it a slower read at times, Good Girl remains a remarkable portrait of youth, desire and shame.
