One Small Thing: Hazel Barkworth

I’d coveted them for months, after spotting them in a train station shop. I didn’t buy them because they were ridiculous. Wine glasses that caught the light and refracted it into rainbows. They reminded me of mermaids. I didn’t need them.

They nagged at me, though, and when lockdown seemed inevitable, so did they. Something so unabashedly camp felt glorious, an iridescent delight in a world that was edging towards grey.

My plan was to save them for when I could pour drinks for friends, clink them - carefully - in celebration. But they’ve never been allowed to wait. They’re not for occasions. I drink squash from them now, gulp tap water. I hold them, shimmering, in every Zoom call.

It’s the same impulse that sees me pluck bowls from the back of cupboards, and fill them with cherry tomatoes and Kettle crisps. Every mealtime has now been elevated. It feels like a ritual - not just food, but a little hallowed moment in the day. As everything that used to be extraordinary has been removed from our lives, the mundane takes on more responsibility - it has to step up and be special.

These ludicrous glasses have added such joy to my days. They make me smile every time I wash or fill them. With their carved ridges and jaunty glass marble instead of a stem, they’re perfect for lockdown. They make every drink of water magical.

Barkworth is excruciatingly good... An impressive first book' OBSERVER

HEAT magazine's READ OF THE WEEK - 'the evocative one'

'Painfully real, and so beautifully written I wanted to stay within its pages forever' CLARE MACKINTOSH

'Stylish and sensual' KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE

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This summer burns with secrets...

It is too hot to sleep. To work. To be questioned time and again by the police.

At the beginning of a stifling, sultry summer, everything shifts irrevocably when Lily doesn't come home one afternoon.

Rachel is Lily's teacher. Her daughter Mia is Lily's best friend. The girls are fifteen - almost women, still children.

As Rachel becomes increasingly fixated on Lily's absence, she finds herself breaking fragile trusts and confronting impossible choices she never thought she'd face.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

Intoxicating and compulsive, Heatstroke is a darkly gripping, thought-provoking novel of crossed boundaries, power and betrayal, that plays with expectations at every turn.

FOR FANS OF ZOE HELLER, EMMA CLINE, EXPECTATION AND MY DARK VANESSA

Hazel Barkworth's debut novel 'Heatstroke' is available from Amazon and Waterstones. Read an interview with Hazel about the process of writing at Curtis Brown Creative.