Awake Awake author Fiona Mozley, centre, with Little Apple Bookshop proprietors Tim Curtis and Philippa Morris during her book-selling shift back on familiar book turf
FIONA Mozley returns to her York roots for her first novel in five years, Awake Awake.
Now living in Edinburgh, she headed back to her home city for a promotional day earlier this month, combining face-to-face interviews with a two-hour book-selling shift at Little Apple Bookshop, in High Petergate, where she worked behind the counter from 2016 to 2019.
“It was my favourite ever part-time job, and I’m still friends with Tim Curtis and Philippa Morris, who run it,” says Fiona, settling into a window seat at Waterstones, in Coney Street, where she would give a talk and sign books later that evening.
“Elmet sold 1,000 copies at Little Apple Bookshop alone and it remains their biggest ever-selling selling book.”
After rising to Booker Prize-shortlisted acclaim with that 2017 debut novel, set in Yorkshire, and following it up in 2021 with Hot Stew, set in a Soho brothel, Fiona roots her third novel almost entirely in the York of the 2000s, where her heroine Mary’s father works at York Minster.
“In a five-year period I wrote two and a half novels, and Awake Awake was the one that gained ground,” says Fiona. “Some writers have a ‘difficult second novel’, but mine was already on the way when Elmet came out, though I did ‘um and aarrgh’ because I had a number of ideas and was pursuing them all at once.
“Again, with this new novel, it started as a tandem project, which was that I’d always wanted to write a novel set in the early 2000s, following a bunch of teenagers negotiating those personal and political times.
“I was born in 1988, so in 2002-2003, I was 14-15, when my generation grew up thinking that everything was going to get better; that ‘history’ was over; that conflict had been eradicated; the economy would go from strength to strength and jobs were plentiful. How wrong we were.”
Fiona wanted to examine that moment of optimism and how the world came crashing down as 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq led to a “readjustment of the perception of where we were going”. She would do so through the eyes of teenagers “because they bring an insight and earnestness”, leading to activism and Stop The War marches.
“I decided to set it in a place outside the global capitals, so why not York, which made the perfect setting as I grew up here,” she says. “All my writing is rooted in long history and place – I studied History at King’s College, Cambridge – so the second strand I explored was an examination of the way we think about the past, in particular memories of the Second World War and memories of family histories.
“Awake Awake is very much fiction, but I wanted to think about the story of my grandfather, on my mother’s side, who was born in Leeds and was an officer in the Royal Amy Medical Corps.”
Her grandfather was from the Orthodox Jewish community, but hid it from his wife and his children, prompting Fiona to ponder how and why he did this.
Fiona toyed with the concept of writing in a “counter-fictional” mode – a narrative or thought process that opposes or subverts the established rules, traditions and tropes of a specific story, genre or fictional world. “I was interested in playing with the idea from Quentin Tarantino’s [2009 black comedy] Inglourious Basterds, which I thought went over the top, but I was keen to see how those ideas spoke to each other.”
In 2023, Fiona and her partner spent a month in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “While I was there, I wanted to read some big American novels, so I read some Philip Roth, who I absolutely love and absolutely hate, but he’s never boring,” she says.
“Reading his books gave me permission to go ‘wild’ in my writing, to not shy away from something that might be controversial. I was struck by how he mixed the personal with the political and the international. Reading him, although I’m a hugely different person and writer, it gave me the opportunity to push in that direction.”
Explaining its impact on Awake Awake, Fiona says: “People are often curious about the relationship between real and fictional, and my response is that I find myself unable to write things as I perceive them and write down events as they happen. I would be a terrible lawyer, an unreliable witness, because for me the process of writing is immediately creative and a new world emerges in the telling.
“I looked into this, and a lot of memory is constructed. It’s a creative act, so what I wanted to do was to exaggerate that. Put in the most stark terms, the [central] character is totally overcome by fictional memories – and the book is also about how our identities are totally informed by those memories.”
Awake Awake, by Fiona Mozley, is published in hardback, audio and ebook by John Murray Press.
The cover artwork for Fiona Mozley’s Awake Awake
Five talking points in Awake Awake
The war novel: How can contemporary novelists write about war?
2000s’ nostalgia and optimism: Anti-war movement of early 2000s was the backdrop to Fiona’s teenage years in York. How has that shaped how she and her generation think today?
Memory and mental illness: The novel’s heroine and her brother both suffer from mental ill-health as Fiona traces a “kind of intergenerational trauma”
Second World War: Fiona has Jewish heritage. Her maternal grandfather was from the Orthodox community in Leeds but hid it from his wife and children. How and why did he do so? Fiona brings family history into the novel to speculate on what might have happened to him.
Activism: Backdrop to the 2000s’ sections of the novel is the Stop The War movement and marches.
Author Fiona Mozley. Picture: Aleksandra Maciejewska
Fiona Mozley: back story
FIONA grew up in York, appearing in multiple theatrical productions before studying History at King’s College, Cambridge. Worked behind the counter at Little Apple Bookshop, in High Petergate, York, from 2016 to 2019.
Debut novel Elmet, published in August 2017 by JM Originals, was set in the claustrophobic rural West Riding of Yorkshire, exploring themes of family bonds, revenge, land rights, modern society and the ultimate price of freedom. Shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize, it was published in the USA in December 2017 and reissued in a JM Classics edition in 2025.
That year too, Elmet was adapted for the stage by Bradford-raised writer-director Javaad Alipoor for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, presented by the Javaad Alipoor Company at Loading Bay, with music by North Eastern folk luminaries The Unthanks & Adrian McNally and movement by Ad Infinitum’s Deb Pugh.
Playing like an ancient tragedy reflected in shards of memory, the world premiere ran from October 22 to November 2 2025 with its story of Cathy and Danny living apart from the world with towering bare-knuckle boxer Daddy, who has built them an idyll amid the trees on a land “made of myths”. However, a great reckoning is coming, led by all-powerful landowner Mr Price, threatening to smash apart everything the trio holds dear.
Second novel Hot Stew, published in 2021, was set in Soho, London, where sex workers Precious and Tabitha fight an eviction order from a real-estate heiress. Third novel Awake Awake was published in June 2026 by John Murray Press.
Fiona has won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Women’s Prize too.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Fiona lives in Edinburgh.