Field Ramble with Naomi Booth

On this episode we speak to Naomi Booth about her latest novel Raw Content. Set during a bleak Yorkshire winter, the book follows Grace, a legal editor whose job demands she reduce unspeakable acts to neatly worded clauses. The care and attention with which Grace approaches this work is only matched by her risk taking outside it. When she falls unexpectedly pregnant she attempts the same compartmentalisation, hoping to keep the new, visceral weirdness that her body is undergoing at arms length. But after the gory, psychedelic experience of birth an unravelling begins that Grace is unable to contain. Embodied by the derelict, grim moorland of West Yorkshire, Raw Content heads into the badlands of Grace’s deepest fears, where violent compulsive thoughts threaten to overwhelm and the repressed roars into view demanding with to be dealt with. 

‘Booth knows that too much is asked of too few, in spaces that are too small, and in lives that have too little headroom for care and community.’

Keiran Goddard 

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