The Names

On the morning after the Great Storm of 1987, Cora walks out through the debris with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register the birth of her son. Her husband Gordon — a local doctor, respected in the community and a frightening, controlling presence at home — expects the boy to be named after him, as the men of his family always have been. Standing at the registrar's desk, Cora hesitates.

From that hesitation, Florence Knapp's debut novel opens into three lives. In one the boy is Bear, the name Maia chose for him, hoping he would grow up brave and soft-hearted. In another he is Julian, the name Cora wanted, which means sky father. In the third he is Gordon, raised in his father's image and his father's shadow. Returning to the family every seven years between 1987 and 2022, the novel carries each version forward in turn, tracing how one small act of choosing ripples outward through a mother, a daughter and a son.

The Names is a quietly devastating book about domestic abuse and the long work of surviving it, about the ties that hold a family together and the ones that hold it hostage, and about how much of a life is settled by chance and how much by the courage to choose differently. It was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna pick, and won Debut Fiction Book of the Year at the 2026 British Book Awards.