Creative Writing academic set for national launch of her new novel

A literary novel that explores the unconventional family set-up of two women platonically co-parenting a baby is set to be published this week.

The Unexpected, by Dr Ellen Wiles, will be released by Harper Collins on Thursday, following an eight-year journey from conception to publication.

Inspired by her own reflections upon motherhood and friendship, alternatives to the nuclear family, and a ground breaking legal case in Canada, Dr Wiles, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, wrote the novel while balancing the commitments of raising her own family and helping students with their burgeoning literary ambitions.

The book has received a string of national reviews, and was a pick for November in The Times, The Daily Mail and the magazine My Weekly. It has been endorsed by a number of critically acclaimed novelists and reviewers, with Marianne Levy calling it a ‘welcome portrait of the beauty, the battle and the exhilarating reinvention of contemporary motherhood’ written ‘with humour, tenderness and wisdom’, and Susannah Wise describing it as ‘intelligent, thought-provoking, tender, and (a) very real exploration of friendship, pregnancy, and the changing face of modern parenting.’ It will be launched with events in both London and Exeter.

“I started writing the book when my daughter – my second child – was a baby,” Dr Wiles said. “I wanted to interrogate the experience of parenthood – how your perspective on the world shifts, how the ‘to parent or not to parent’ question impacts your friendships, and how, as a mother, you start to see the structures of society in a new way. I began to think about alternative approaches to family and kinship, beyond the traditional nuclear family unit – like matrilineal structures in other animal and human cultures – and also about how our family law system has slowly evolved to reflect social change and the realities of contemporary women’s lives.”

And it was when Dr Wiles discovered the story of two lawyers in Canada, who became the first in the world to be co-mothers on the birth certificate of a child, that the theme of the book really began to coalesce.

“I thought it was interesting that the law has finally evolved to better accommodate gay and lesbian families, but not necessarily families that can be seen as queer, but those that are not based upon a sexual relationship between two parents,” she added.

This is the fourth book written by Dr Wiles, and her second novel, following her 2017 debut, The Invisible Crowd, which explored human experiences of the immigration and asylum system in the UK and drew from her then career as a barrister. The commitment required to carve out the writing time for this novel proved equally challenging, with sessions snatched around the margins of her day – and her daughter’s sleep times.

Dr Wiles, who has been teaching in the Department of English and Creative Writing since 2020, has, however, enjoyed sharing her writing experience with the students she teaches. They include new first year students taking the joint honours English and Creative Writing programme, who are often trying out creative writing for the very first time; Creative Writing MA students taking a course called Writing for the Planet; and PhD students working on full-length books of their own.

“It’s great for students to be able study creative writing with academics who are actively writing professionally and have work being published,” she said. “Whatever stage you are at as a writer, it inevitably makes you feel a bit vulnerable at first to share your writing and await critique. But in a positive learning environment, where only constructive criticism is cultivated, students quickly learn to become more comfortable with the process – and they also find out that providing feedback to fellow writers is not just about helping them to improve, but it’s also enabling you to improve as a self-editor of your own work.”

The first public launch of The Unexpected will be a ticketed event at 7pm on Friday 29 November at McCoys Arcade in Exeter, in collaboration with Bookbag, who will be selling books, and Sacred Grounds café, who will be serving drinks and hot food. Ellen will be in conversation with comedian Will Adamsdale, who will also perform some comedy songs on the theme of quirky family dynamics. The audiobook will be narrated by celebrated actress Gemma Whelan – known for her roles in Game of Thrones and The Crown.

“The book has been long time in the making, so it does feel strange now that it’s on the brink of release,” she said. “I hope that a lot of people will find it an engaging read, whether or not they are mothers themselves, or want to be – it is at least as much about friendship and family – and it is also about that sliding door moment when you’re thinking about the potential impact of parenthood on friendships and careers, which hits most of us at some point.

“It also delves into the idea of platonic romance, and the boundaries of friendship, so I think it brings something genuinely new to readers. I’m glad that it’s coming out direct to paperback so will be more affordable to people from the beginning. But there are so many books published these days, it’s not easy to be noticed – even if you have a cover design like this one that really pops out. I’ll be very grateful to anyone who does enjoy this book and finds a moment to post a kind review.”