What's in a name? Rather a lot in this intriguing debut novel

What if? And what’s in a name? Those are the questions at the heart of Florence Knapp’s clever, beautiful and deeply moving debut novel about one family and three possible fates. Cora has just had her second child, a boy. As she walks to the registrar’s office with her little girl, Maia, in the aftermath of the Great Storm in 1987, she turns her choices over in her mind: should she do as she’s been told and name him Gordon, after her abusive, domineering husband? Break with family tradition and risk Gordon’s fury with Bear, Maia’s choice – “soft and cuddly, but also brave and strong”? Or seek a compromise with Julian, which means “sky father”’, a name her husband might just about tolerate as a paternal tribute? As the registrar waits with her pen and the storm lingers in the air, a shimmer of fate – the Sliding Doors moment – hangs over the story: what if? Knapp’s deceptively simple idea is to split her tale after that moment, charting the consequences of all three decisions over the next three decades through the different versions of Cora, her son – Bear, Julian and Gordon – and the characters who surround them.

Like One Day – which, along with Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, feels like something of a cousin to this book – The Names skips ahead through time, giving us a snapshot of their lives every seven years, from that opening storm to the pandemic. Bear is a wild, loving child who fills the adults around him with “instant fondness. Delight.



He was a buttercup held beneath the chin: do you like butter? Yes, always yes.” He grows up to be an archaeologist, always travelling, resisting settling down with his childhood sweetheart. Julian is quiet and gentle but can never shake the fear that he will inherit his father’s brutality.

Gordon is misunderstood, manipulated by his father and feels his “sadness dry up and spark into anger”. He wishes his name was Luke. Knapp’s deftly woven story is at once a big, bold experiment, a playful exercise in nominative determinism, a meditation on fate and a coming-of-age story.

A patchwork, in other words – a literary version of the quilts Knapp makes alongside her writing. At its centre, radiating throughout every timeline, is the violence, gaslighting and cruelty Cora endures at the hands of her husband, an outwardly respectable GP. Knapp is unsparing in her descriptions, conjuring a house filled with tension: “Cora has the sensation of her throat closing as she goes to swallow, and it is like drowning.

The room is an over tightened violin string. It is just a question of when it will snap.” I raced through these chapters, desperate to see if Cora would be safe – which perhaps tells you something about the vividness and depth of the characters Knapp creates.

The book’s ambitious structure could easily be its undoing, turning it into a hollow academic exercise. Instead, the alternate narratives add layers of meaning and pathos. Watching Cora pick up the receiver of the disconnected landline and listen “to the blank nothingness of the earpiece” that “doesn’t even offer the seashell echo of possibility” is even more heartwrenching when you’ve just seen a version of her who’s happy.

This isn’t a bleak book: it’s fundamentally compassionate and hopeful. Knapp draws warm, vivid characters, finds meaning in everyday details and makes the world look and feel richer with her magpie eye for an unexpected, shining image or sound: “Cora had never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a downward thud like someone slamming down a sports bag”.

But although Knapp delights in exploring how her characters’ names influence their lives, it’s never as simple as Bear is virtuous, Gordon terrible; she shows it’s possible to transcend the fate that seems to be in store for you. In one of her typically compact, gorgeous lines, she writes how Maia’s goodness “scrunched at Cora’s heart”. The Names will do the same to yours.

The Names by Florence Knapp is published on May 6 (Phoenix, £16.99).