Bermondsey Girl, my first novel published by an actual publishing house, Water Dragon Publishing, is due to release July 22nd! You can preorder right now on Kindle, and it will go wide later this month, with print books also available. Go to the publisher’s website for those marketplaces.
It’s a funny thing, going from being a fully independent author to a hybrid one. I’m used to being in control of every aspect of publishing so this was a paradigm shift. Although it was nice not being responsible for every. single. detail. For that I am grateful to Water Dragon for doing all the things. I just had to write the book.
Now I have to digress here to talk about the book itself. I wrote Bermondsey Girl a while ago (its working title was The Hollowness) but even though I liked the story, it didn’t feel like it fit in with the rest of my work. All my other books are set in the past, with fantastical elements. This story is set in a neighborhood in London in 2080, where climate change has really impacted the poor people living near the River Thames. Really different, right? Except when I started talking about it to my author friends (shout out to Scott, Marvin, and Dover), they pointed out that the heart of the story isn’t the setting. It’s the characters, especially the protagonist, Idonny.
Idonny is young, isolated, deprived, but still yearns for something more. Her story in the book begins with her at the whims of the tough blokes who also live in the dilapidated tower block she calls home. She has no agency. She gets passed from man to man like a toy.
The story is her journey towards being herself, finding her joy and her freedom.
Which to be honest is a pretty common thread throughout all my books. So I guess Bermondsey Girl does fit, even though she’s wearing machine-extruded baggy t-shirts and leggings, instead of corsets and petticoats.
Like I said, you can preorder it right now. If you do, please let me know what you think.
BJ Sikes, author 