We hope you are well, and that you might be interested in the news that one of us has a new book out. Emily’s debut novel, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is set in the Japanese city of Osaka in the early 2000s. It’s about the complicated friendship between two young women – a schoolteacher and a nightclub hostess – and what happens when one of them suddenly disappears.
Unlike A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, which we coauthored, only Emily’s name appears as the author on the cover this time. But Emma is not entirely absent from the text. Emily included a tribute to her in the Acknowledgements pages and the novel is also dedicated to her.
As Emily narrates in a post on her personal website, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing’s path to publication has been long, convoluted and strange. Readers with long memories might recall from earlier posts like this one that her friendship with Emma began when the two were both young English language teachers working in Japan in roughly the same period as which the novel is set.
The early 2000s is also, incidentally, the period in which Emily began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. This means that the novel’s journey from first rough scribblings to bookshop shelves took over twenty years! And Emma has, of course, been at her side all the way, giving feedback on multiple drafts and offering writerly advice and encouragement.
Having begun the book when she was a young woman in her twenties, Emily worked hard on it for many years. It was eventually taken on by a literary agent who submitted it to countless publishers, but, although it got tantalising close on several occasions (and also won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for unpublished female writers in 2015), it never quite made it into print.
Eventually, Emily decided to put A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing aside to concentrate on other projects, such as the literary friendship blog, Something Rhymed, which she ran with Emma, their 2017 book A Secret Sisterhood and her 2021 solo-authored group biography Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice.
In 2024, however, Emily received an email from her literary agent letting her know that an editor who’d read the novel’s manuscript some years before, at a time when circumstances prevented her from acquiring it, was interested in taking another look. This was followed, a few weeks later, with an offer from Manilla Press to publish the book, plus the prospect of many more months thoroughly revising those pages to get them ready for the novel’s release last week.
This was, of course, immensely exciting for Emily and, as you’d expect, Emma was one of the first people with whom she shared the astonishing news. But the idea of returning to a manuscript that had been abandoned for the best part of a decade was also daunting, and she was glad to have Emma to turn to for guidance and support, just as they had done for each other on so many past occasions.
When Emily’s publisher asked her to suggest someone to chair the discussion at her London book launch, held at the fantastic independent Burley Fisher Books, there really was only one possible choice in her mind and she was thrilled when Emma said yes.
Although we’ve shared a stage on many past occasions, particularly events related to Something Rhymed and A Secret Sisterhood, we have had only limited practice at interviewing each other, so in some ways this was an unusual experience. On the other hand, since we know each other so well, there was something about sitting there before the audience in that packed bookshop that evening that felt incredibly familiar. You could say that it felt quite simply like two old friends getting together for a chat, which really we suppose it was.
Something Rhymed 