Author: Cole Sullivan

Karen Sullivan, publisher of Orenda Books, is delighted to announce the acquisition of World English Language rights for Ronnie Turner’s So Pretty and a second (untitled) sequel, in a two-book deal negotiated with Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency.

Teddy Colne arrives in the small town of Rye, hoping to settle down and leave his past behind him. But fear blisters through the streets, and the locals warn him to avoid a shop known only as Berry & Vincent, where people have been known to come to a bad end. Teddy, however, is desperate to discover why everyone fears the proprietor of this establishment, and takes a job behind its dusty, creepy windows. Ada moved to Rye with her young son to escape a damaged childhood and years of never fitting in, but she’s lonely, and ostracised by the community. Ada is ripe for affection and friendship, and everyone knows it.  As old secrets bleed out into this town, so too will a mystery about a family who vanished fifty years earlier, and a community living on a knife-edge. Teddy looks for answers, thinking he is safe, but some truths are better left undisturbed, and his past will find him here, just as it has always found him before. And before long, it will find Ada too.

Karen says, ‘I am beyond excited to share this disturbing, idiosyncratic and wonderfully lyrical novel with readers worldwide. As they say, I have “history” with Ronnie. I met her when she was just sixteen, at the Penzance Literary Festival and, even then, saw the huge potential in her writing. When So Pretty was sent in on submission, I read it instantly and remain awed and fully mesmerised by Ronnie’s extraordinary writing and blown away by this original, elegant, quirky and gloriously visceral novel. There is a pervasive, brooding tension that is both unsettling and deeply compelling, and its complex themes continue to provoke thought long after the final page is turned. Ronnie is an Orenda author if ever I saw one, and I am truly thrilled to publish her sublime work. Still in her early twenties and now a Waterstones bookseller, Ronnie is an exciting and original talent, and I have no doubt that readers will be as entranced as we are.’

Ronnie says, ‘I am super excited to join the Orenda Family and work with the mighty Karen Sullivan. She is an utter powerhouse, and I have been in awe of her and all of Orenda for many years. I feel very lucky to have her championing my work, and to have found the perfect home for So Pretty, a novel which looks at identity, obsession and the perilous bonds of family. I know Karen, West Camel, Emily and I will make a great team and I’m so looking forward to this journey together, and to seeing So Pretty in the hands of readers very soon.’

Emily says ‘I have been dying to work with Karen Sullivan for a long time and when Ronnie sent me So Pretty, it had Orenda’s name all over it, so it made perfect sense that Karen loves it as much as I do. Ronnie is a fiercely talented writer, whose star is well and truly on the rise. She excels at the weird, wonderful, and downright unsettling. Watch this space, publishing!’

So Pretty will be published in January 2023 by Orenda Books. For more information, please contact Karen@orendabooks.co.uk.

Karen Sullivan, Publisher of Orenda Books

For anyone with optimum ability – physical, mental and otherwise – it’s difficult to imagine what it might be like when things we’ve always taken for granted are no longer there, to countenance a life without ease. 

That was certainly the case for me. I  – and then my children – rarely experienced anything other than mild illness, but then two things changed that. 

When he was approaching two years old, my middle son experienced a serious brain infection as a rare side effect of the MMR vaccine. He was left profoundly deaf in his left ear, and that put us both on a steep learning curve. I was a young mother, completely out of my depth, and pretty much unable to grasp the implications let alone the mitigations that needed to be put in place – sitting at the front of the class with his ‘hearing ear’ facing the teacher; a red-flag alert when he swam competitively, because he couldn’t hear the whistle; a grudging acceptance that he wasn’t ignoring me when I spoke to him. He genuinely couldn’t hear me. Even still, there was so much we didn’t consider. When he was preparing for his first year at the University of Edinburgh, he had to ‘tick the disabled box’, something he was reluctant to do, something he had literally never done, and the services and products on offer filled me with guilt. They could, for example, provide a vibrating pillow that worked as an alarm. It honestly never once occurred to me that he wouldn’t be able to hear an alarm. Rightly or wrongly, we operated as usual and most of his friends – even close ones – were unaware that he was deaf. 

But it got me thinking, which got us talking. Where’s the shame in admitting that you’re different? That your needs are different? As someone who has always encouraged my sons to be themselves, to be unafraid of being different, I was surprised and a little saddened that this particular difference was somehow embarrassing for him to admit. When he was applying for his first jobs as a trainee lawyer, he outright refused to ‘tick the disabled box’, and I didn’t really know what to think about that. He got a job; I doubt they know that one ear doesn’t work. 

That’s an invisible disability, I guess. Like chronic illness or pain or emotional illnesses or anything else that makes us less or un able. And that’s where the second thing comes in. It’s no secret that I became seriously ill when I caught Covid in March of 2020, and it changed my life completely. I suffered not just from Long Covid, with overwhelming, crippling fatigue, brain fog and memory loss (to the extent that I had to surround myself with notebooks and write down everything, when previous to this, my entire business and home life was held there), arthritis in my fingers, and staggering digestive pain and headaches that would appear for no reason. I also cried a lot. And slept. My abilities were disabled, so that, in itself, becomes disability, right? With every subsequent case of Covid (and I’ve had alarmingly many) and even vaccine, I was flattened completely. Disabled. Unable.

In publishing, we talk about diversity all the time, and getting recognition for groups of people who are not represented the way they should be, but that focus has been far too heavily weighted in favour of class and ethnicity. True diversity means representation in books, in marketing, in everything, for all groups of people, including those who are disabled – visibly or invisibly, obviously or hidden – and we, as an industry, definitely fall short on that front. 

A number of our Orenda team have disabilities, including chronic illness, and we are, as a result, collectively compassionate, and eager to ensure that our events, for example, are accessible, that our working practices are fair and inclusive, that our books are representative. But it wasn’t until Covid stopped me in my tracks that I realised the immense importance of including characters and situations that might fall outside the ‘able norm’ in our books. 

When people see themselves represented in books, they feel seen and reading becomes more relevant and immersive. When we read about people whose lives are different from ours, who face challenges that we cannot even begin to imagine, we learn. We understand more deeply; we can take a literary walk in another person’s shoes. And only then can there be the change we need to see in our society. It took a personal experience of being unable for me to understand the importance of this; the importance of awareness, of compassion, of inclusion, of representation … of the need to include accurate portrayals of disability and the disabled in our books, and to keep this in mind in everything we do. I would, personally, devour a book that encompassed my experience; my son and I would both be riveted to a book about ‘invisible deafness’, and we would urge others to read it too.

We’re actively seeking change, within the parameters of our determination to publish bold, original, thought-provoking fiction, and we urge other publishers to do the same. Indies are well placed to forge a path, and that is exactly what we’ll do here at Orenda Books … an accessible path, of course.

I’ve taken some big risks with my novels, not only in that I write in almost a different genre every time, but because of the topics I’ve chosen to explore. I don’t like to make things easy for myself when I create fiction – I enjoy being challenged, pushed, and learning something new. This is why I’ve often written outside my own limited experience. Yes, most of my novels have a little of me in them, I admit, a little of the emotional aspects of my life, but who doesn’t feature in their own work? It’s impossible to hide fully in our prose.

Writing outside of what I know – so to speak, if we throw the ‘write what you know’ advice on its head – has meant exploring a variety of disabilities in some way. I didn’t randomly choose these conditions; they were often visited upon me. When I created Sebastian, a readers’ favourite from This Is How We Are Human, and perhaps my proudest character – I based him on a dear friend of mine. Sean is a real-life young man who is autistic, and he’s very vocal about this, very proud, and very annoyed when people get him wrong. Who wouldn’t be? So when I put him on the page, albeit as a fictional creature, I knew I had to get it JUST right. Sean made sure I did. He acted out certain scenes with me before I wrote them, which I then recorded and listened back to, to make sure the way he spoke was accurate. He also read the finished thing and gave further advice. 

I worried that taking on the whole spectrum of autism, especially when I haven’t lived it, might be met with criticism. And I would have understood that. We need to hear the ‘own voices’ of those living different lives to ours, those in the minority, those on the fringes of society, those often misunderstood, those without a voice. That’s the priority. But Sean assured me that he was being heard via my pen, so to speak; he didn’t know how to write but I knew what he wanted to be said, and I can.

One condition that I’ve explored twice now is Type 1 Diabetes, which my daughter was diagnosed with aged just seven, after almost going into a coma. It felt absolutely natural to explore this complex illness that involves numerous daily blood test and injections, and that can render the sufferer unconscious during the dreaded hypo. In How to be Brave nine-year-old Rose is based on my daughter and what she went through after diagnosis, and in The Lion Tamer Who Lost Andrew, one half of my tragic gay relationship, has been diabetic since he was a child. Was it easier to write what I knew? Of course it was. There wasn’t any research, and I wasn’t afraid of judgement, having experienced this. But it almost felt lazy, which is ridiculous because it was very emotional to look back on a painful time in my life and paint a person going through the same. 

In my current novel, Nothing Else, a main character realises that she is beginning to lose her hearing. This is doubly difficult for her, because she loves music, and is a beautiful pianist. Some of my research involved chatting to my sister who can communicate via BSL (British Sign Language) and she explained to me how that works and who uses it. I also have a friend who uses a hearing aid and she described exactly what everyday world sounds are like for her. But really, the main requirement for writing the unknown, aside from research, is having an open mind and some empathy. We’ve probably all lost something we loved or been forced to give up something we didn’t want to, and these experiences can shade our story with the necessary layers.

Watch out for a future character who is a wheelchair user and is on the receiving end of pity he neither wants nor deserves. My own mother has used a wheelchair for the last three years and it’s really opened by eyes to how unseen these people are, not only physically, because we have to look down to speak with them and because we can miss them in a crowd, but due to a lack of access, a lack of consideration, and through pure ignorance, often speaking to a carer rather than the person sitting before us. I realised how many simple things I’m able to do – get on a train without assistance, go into a shop that has a step leading to it, go into a bar that’s underground, fit through every door. This gave me a great deal of compassion for my character.

Are there any topics or people I wouldn’t write about? I’d like to think not. But I’d only do it if I felt I could do it sensitively, with respect, with a great deal of research, and with my heart in the right place.