Bobby Palmer

Bobby Palmer is a freelance journalist who has written extensively for household titles such as Time Out, GQ, Esquire, Men’s Health and Cosmopolitan.

His debut novel, Isaac and the Egg, was published in the UK as a major launch title by Headline on 18 August. German, Dutch, Czech and Russian foreign language rights have also been sold.

Isaac and the Egg is available to borrow on our catalogue.

Who were your heroes as you were growing up?

When I was younger, I always wanted to be an illustrator. The first series of books I remember falling in love with were The Edge Chronicles, illustrated beautifully by Chris Riddell, and all I wanted was to be able to draw like him. In fact, I’d illustrate and staple my own Edge Chronicles rip-offs on printer paper with coloured pencils.

Then, when I was a teenager, those books become comics, and my heroes became comic book writers and artists: Neil Gaiman, Matt Wagner, and so on. Even now, I approach writing novels with a very visual eye, and I hope that the more playful, artistic side to my writing comes across.

Your background is as a journalist. How did you find the different discipline of writing a novel and having to keep coming back to it?

By the time I’d gone off to uni and set my sights on becoming a full-time writer, journalism was all I cared about. I loved the buzz of working in magazines, and wanted nothing more than to rise up the ranks and become an editor. Then, the magazine I was working at closed down, I went freelance, and I decided – more as a hobby than anything else – to try my hand at writing fiction.

I’d never actually planned on becoming a novelist. I loved the idea of writing a novel, but it felt like something far-off and fanciful, and I was worried I wouldn’t be good enough. But from day one of writing my first book, I knew I didn’t want to do anything else. There’s nothing like starting with a blank page and ending with a whole world you’ve quite literally made it.

I love it, although it did take me a while to get used to having to hold an entire 70,000 word story in your head all at once, jumping around between chapters and characters to build tension and patch up plot holes. As someone who rarely had to write more than 2,000 words, that was a challenge!

We've all been through lockdown recently. Was Isaac your lockdown book, and if so did you find yourself drawing on the lockdown experience?

It was indeed, although the idea came before lockdown. The lead character, Isaac Addy, was always going to be a shut-in, forever in his dressing gown, slowly losing touch with the outside world and, consequently, his grip on reality. Then a couple of weeks into writing the first draft, we were plunged into lockdown, I lost all of my freelance work, and I found myself experiencing that same kind of isolation – with nothing to do but write.

I think it’s a very insular book. For the most part, there are two main characters (only one of them human) and it takes place on a very small, sometimes claustrophobic, scale. I wrote the whole thing in that first lockdown, and I think that shows. But, for the same reason, I hope that there’s a cautious optimism in it – a good bit of joy, and the promise of a much-needed light at the end of the tunnel.

Isaac and the Egg is not an easy book to describe covering grief, joy and baked beans. How did you even begin to pitch it to your publisher?

Well, depending on which way you look at it, I was either very lucky or very unlucky: Isaac and the Egg was actually the second novel I’d written, having failed to sell the first (which was a slightly complex attempted-epic with plenty of time travel and alternate dimensions). To write an entire book and it basically come to nothing was obviously a pretty crushing experience, but it did result in representation from my agent, Millie Hoskins, without whom I wouldn’t have a career as an author.

When I went into writing Isaac and the Egg, Millie gave me plenty of freedom to pursue this idea that I’d only told her about in the loosest terms. Essentially, I went off and wrote the whole thing, then came back four or five months later with a finished manuscript, saying, “I hope you like it.” Thankfully, she did, as did the publishers we approached. I knew I wanted to go with my publisher, Headline, because they were never dubious about the book’s weirdness – or, should I say, uniqueness. If anything, they only ever saw it as a positive.

When you started writing, did you know roughly where you wanted to end up or just see where the story took you?

The original idea for the book came from wanting to present the reader with this massive contradiction from page one: the darkest, most human possible story, with this totally absurd element – the “egg” – right in the middle of it all. From there, I could picture certain scenes. Not to give too much away, but the opening scene, the scene in the kitchen and the scene with the clothes all existed long before I had an actual plot.

By the time I started writing, I knew exactly where the story would start and end. But it was only when I got about halfway through that the point of the story totally transformed for me. Everything clicked into place. Once again, without giving too much away, there’s a realisation that comes about three-quarters of the way in, which kind of turns the entire book on its head. That was my eureka moment, and it came surprisingly late.

Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?

All I’ll say is that I’m working on a second book, that it follows a young man who returns to his childhood home in the countryside after his father goes missing, and that it features a rather enigmatic, amber-eyed fox who I can’t wait to introduce readers to.

One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?

One of my favourite folk musicians, Johnny Flynn, recently released an album with the nature writer Robert Macfarlane called Lost in the Cedar Wood. It’s a concept album which updates The Epic of Gilgamesh for a post-pandemic age, and it’s a stunning piece of work. I’d recommend listening to it in its entirety. Then listening to it again.

I mention Johnny because he’s responsible for one of the biggest pinch-me moments of my short career as a novelist so far. When my publisher were planning the audiobook of Isaac and the Egg, they approached him to read it quite early on – and he said yes! He’s done a really amazing job with it, and I’d listened to a lot of his music while writing the book, so going down to the studio to watch him record was a really special full-circle moment for me.

What is the best advice you were ever given?

It’s not a piece of advice that was given to me specifically, but there’s a fairly famous Terry Pratchett quote which I came across when first taking on the daunting task of writing a debut novel: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” It helped me immensely, giving me the confidence to just write something down, no matter how rushed or rubbish. Because once you’ve written that first draft, the hard bit is done – and you can turn it into something that people might actually want to read.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

My birth name is “Robert,” meaning I have the exact same name as the popstar who blessed the world with Addicted to Love.