Announcing my debut novel: These Glass Bodies

available for pre-order now

I am so excited to share that my debut novel, These Glass Bodies, will be published in hardback, audiobook and e-book in spring 2027, and is available for pre-order here (if ordering from outside the UK, options for ordering are currently limited but more will be available soon).

Tender and exquisitely crafted, These Glass Bodies is an absorbing, unsettling debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world.

It is the warmest spring anyone can remember. Anna lives with her father near the ocean in Scotland. She spends her time hand-rearing nestlings from the wild and has never felt more at peace than in Invergrian, with her birds and her woods and her work.

Rory, eleven years old, hasn’t spoken a word for five years, not since his mother Pip left him and his father Angus. But when he stumbles upon Anna’s house of birds, he can’t believe his luck. He’s long believed birds to be magic, and Anna seems happy to teach him how to help them, not questioning his silence. Seeing his son so happy with the birds and with the beautiful and enigmatic Anna, Angus too finds the fog he has been immersed in finally start to lift.

But as the spring burns on, amid the quiet work of saving the nestlings, alarm bells start ringing. Water becomes scarce. The elderly in the town become fearful. Exhausted birds start falling out of the sky. And Anna discovers a body washed up on the shore.

The novel grew from the seed of a single question someone asked me in the spring of 2018, during the first field season of my PhD. I’d been explaining to them, at the bar of a pub in Falmouth, that part of my research involved monitoring wild jackdaw nests, collecting the bodies of chicks that died, and ferrying these bodies to the lab freezer so I could extract their DNA and undertake genomic analyses.

The person at the bar replied: but why didn’t you try to save them all?

It was easy to respond to this question at the time, to say: well, having more chicks than they can usually feed is an evolutionary strategy the parents employ to make sure they can raise as many chicks as possible, and, as a result, around half of all jackdaw chicks naturally starve in the nest. This means that hundreds of chicks die per jackdaw colony, and many thousands in a single county, so how could anyone save all of them? And if they did, where would those hand-reared birds be released? There would be too many, they would outcompete other species, or starve because there is not enough food, ecosystems would be disrupted… and so on.

But still, the question lingered in the back of my mind. The question of what kind of person would try to save them all, of what kind of person would try to stop the suffering of every living thing, and how that person could possibly carry the weight of it all. And over time, this question became entwined with others. Like, in the face of human-induced climate change, what responsibility do we have to our fellow creatures—whose suffering we are now directly causing—and how do we carry this?

And so, over three intense months last winter, after a long incubation, I wrote These Glass Bodies. During this time I was also on the waiting list for an autism diagnosis, which is important in many ways to this novel, too.

The Bookseller announced the novel this week, and my brilliant editor Sophie said:

‘This is one of those rare novels I want to press into the hands of everyone I know. A stunning, unique debut, set on the coast in Scotland, it is at once a love story, a tale of disconnected people finding one another and an unsettling exploration of our fragile relationship with the natural world. It also features the most tender, beautiful rendering of neurodivergent characters I’ve come across. It captured my heart completely.’

The biggest thank you to my agent, Laura, at Greene & Heaton, and to Sophie at Manilla Press, both of whom are so wonderful to work with and have made all of this possible.

I cannot wait to share These Glass Bodies with you.

Rebecca x

PS: the cover is currently being designed and I can’t wait to share this with you, too!