Small Hours

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What to expect

'Powerful' JOANNA GLEN
'Beautiful' KATE SAWYER
'A triumph' JENNIE GODFREY

The eagerly awaited new novel from Bobby Palmer, author of the critically acclaimed debut Isaac and the Egg.

If you stood before sunrise in this wild old place, looking through the trees into the garden, here's what you'd see:

A father and son, a fox standing between them.

Jack, home for the first time in years, still determined to be the opposite of his father.

Gerry, who would rather talk to animals than the angry man back under his roof.

Everything that follows is because of the fox, and because Jack's mother is missing. It spans generations of big dreams and lost time, unexpected connections and things falling apart, great wide worlds and the moments that define us.

If you met them in the small hours, you'd begin to piece together their story.

PRAISE FOR ISAAC AND THE EGG

'Truly one of the most beautiful stories you will ever read' Joanna Cannon

'Unique, tender and funny' Pandora Sykes

'A future classic' Clare Mackintosh

'Like nothing I've ever read before' Stylist

'An arresting debut novel about grief in the most wonderfully oblique way' Reverend Richard Coles

'Just magic' Kate Sawyer

'Quirky and raw' Grazia

(P)2024 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Critics Review

  • A powerful story of losing ourselves and each other – and how the natural world can find us and put us back together again

    Joanna Glen
  • I devoured this in forty-eight hours, it being about my very favourite reading topic: dysfunctional families and the many ways in which they can both fracture and heal. Its connection to the natural world makes this extra-special and almost poetic. A triumph

    Jennie Godfrey
  • Lyrical and evocative, Small Hours is a book like no other, a beautiful testament to the importance of family and what it’s truly like to be human

    Awais Khan

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