My new book, Tending!

I’m so excited to share news of my latest book today - Tending: How Care Binds the World - and first of all, to reveal the beautiful cover!

Tell me what you think! The luminous design is the work of Grace Han, who somehow managed to distill a summer dusk into a few square inches of paper. This is the US cover - the UK version is also gorgeous, and I’ll be sharing that with you in September.

Pre-order Tending here

I wasn’t supposed to write this book at all. During the time that Tending is set, I was deep in the weeds of a different manuscript, but I couldn’t make it work as my life seemed to be crumbling. My husband was getting sicker and sicker but a diagnosis never seemed to come; over in Spain, my mother was becoming increasingly disabled; and my son was just being a teenager and needing my love and attention. I felt pulled taut between the three, my own needs vanishing amid the endless torsion.

It’s no surprise, in retrospect, that I found a perfect metaphor in the spider. During this time, I felt like both the web, strung in the void between immoveable objects, and the spider herself, anxiously engaged in the act of creation and repair. But it was a surprise to me, because I’ve always been terrified of this scuttling creature up to this point.

While all this was going on, I started recording my experience in the third person as if it were a novel. It seemed to me that I could turn this into a therapeutic hobby, writing about myself as if it were someone else’s life. Everything became overwhelming though, and so I set it aside altogether after a while. There was no time to write, only to do. But in the aftermath of H’s surgery, at the end of last summer, I returned to those words and began the work of converting them back into my own story.

As you might expect, there are lots of detours along the way, not least because I’d been trying to understand my newfound peace with the arachnean (I got to write about Fernand Deligny in this book, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time). There’s gardens, medieval mysticism, encounters with trees and bees (always) and no small amount of accidentally setting things on fire.

At its heart, though, Tending is a book about care - not the sentimentalised version, but the visceral experience of keeping other bodies alive, the drive and obsession, the transcendence and exhaustion. I know that a lot of people in this community have experienced care from one angle or another, and I hope this will offer some recognition and visibility to a group of people who hold the world together, and yet who are so carelessly forgotten.

It’s a while yet before you can read it - it will be out in both the US and the UK in March 2027 - but in the meantime, would you consider pre-ordering from your favourite retailer? It would mean the world to me, and would really help to bring the book to the attention of booksellers. There are online links for both UK and US readers here, but of course please do speak to your local bookseller if you can.

I’m excited/terrified to hear what you think!