Fairlight Books signs Lynda Clark’s ‘wonderfully weird’ second novel

Fairlight Books has acquired the “wonderfully weird, darkly funny” second novel by award-winning author Lynda Clark.

World rights including audio were acquired by publisher Laura Shanahan directly from the author, with publication scheduled for November 2026. Strange Talk is described as a “high-concept, genre-bending” novel about unconventional love, dysfunctional families and sentient household appliances.

Its blurb reads: “Amie has always heard things other people can’t. Her rickety old house is alive with voices: smug comments from the fridge, needy cries from the smoke alarm, romantic overtures from the toaster. Then there’s Door, Amie’s closest friend, whose voice has abruptly gone quiet. When her nephew Jay comes to stay unexpectedly, Amie is forced to let the outside world into the house. As she helps Jay to navigate his sexuality and estrangement from his parents, with backup from her eccentric ‘found family’ of appliances, she begins to acknowledge her own secret longings. But does the object of her desires feel the same?”

Clark is the author of Beyond Kidding, published by Fairlight Books in 2019, and the short story collection Dreaming in Quantum and Other Stories, published by Fairlight Books in May 2021. Beyond Kidding is in development for a feature with Film4, while Dreaming in Quantum contains Ghillie’s Mum, which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and appeared on numerous shortlists, including for the BBC Short Story award. Clark is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Narrative Futures Master’s programme at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

She said: “I’m excited to be publishing another novel with Fairlight Books. Strange Talk is a weird, magical-realist love story, and it’s also a dark comedy about history repeating itself and breaking free of the roles foisted on us. The premise was partly inspired by my research into public reactions to ‘speaking machines’, from Victorian devices like Euphonia to contemporary virtual assistants like Siri.”