Little Disasters: new paperback cover reveal

Any idea what day it is? Lockdown 3, with its challenging combination of homeschooling, bleak weather and fears about highly-transmissible new covid variants, means I’ve been opting out of social media and have started to lose track of the dates.

So it’s come as a bit of a surprise to discover that the paperback of Little Disasters is out in three and a half weeks - on March 4!

The hardback was published on April 2, around 10 days after bookshops closed in the first lockdown, and the paperback will be published during another lockdown, with physical bookshops again all shut. At this point I want to paraphrase Oscar Wilde - but the bad luck of this coincidence is a first world problem (as I keep telling my kids: the main thing is we’re all well; no mean feat given their dad’s a hospital doctor) and Iuckily books are still for sale in supermarkets and from bookshops online.

What’s more, my fabulous team at S&S have gone above and beyond in producing a fresh new cover for the paperback which I think is suitably thriller-y. It keeps the black and yellow of the HB original and gives it a new twist. I’m also very grateful for the quotes. “Taut, clever, compelling” from The Girl on the Train’s Paula Hawkins? “Impossible-to-look-away” from the Observer? I’m quite stunned by these and the pages of quotes inside.

I’m also feeling very lucky in that it will be for sale in Waterstones, WH Smiths, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Asda. You can also find it online at independent bookstores, via Bookshop.org. Preorders really help authors and I’d be incredibly grateful if you’d consider ordering from these highlighted links.

Little Disasters is about the darkest reaches of motherhood, the judgements women make about each other, and the redemptive power of friendship. Though it’s more domestic than Anatomy of a Scandal, it also centres on a professional woman who has to make a judgment that will have a devastating impact on others, and has a paediatrician, rather than a barrister, at its heart.

I’d love you to read it but, if you’re unsure, you can read the first three chapters here or you can listen to an audiobook extract here. There are even some book club questions here. Thank you for reading to the end of this hard sell! The fact that people are still reading, in the current climate, is immensely heartening.