Heather Child's Blog

If you’d like to know what The Undoing of Arlo Knott is about and why I wrote it, you can find out by listening to the audio clip above.

As first played by Caroline Martin on BBC Radio Somerset at 8:20am Sunday 6th July 2025.

Find out more about The Undoing of Arlo Knott, or read the transcript below.

My name is Heather Child and I’m going to tell you about my second novel published by Orbit, The Undoing of Arlo Knott.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time on a computer and it is such a relief when I make a mistake to hit the ‘undo’ button. I also make a lot of mistakes in life and I thought: how amazing would it be to have an undo button for those mistakes?

The Undoing of of Arlo Knott is about a man who develops the mysterious ability to reverse his last action. It makes him better at life, able to charm any woman and impress any friend. If he makes a mistake, he can just undo it. He can experience anything without worrying about the consequences. His is a life without regret. By his very nature, he can’t lose.

But second chances aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. As wonderful as his new life is, a mistake in Arlo’s traumatic childhood still haunts him, and the temptation to undo, undo, and keep undoing could be too much to resist.

In writing this book, I was exploring my interest in the nature of regret and hindsight. It’s quite a preoccupation for many people, and you can easily find a list of the top 10 deathbed regrets, for instance. I was interested in whether there is any value to regret to making mistakes. If you make no mistakes in life, does it turn you into a better person?

The Undoing of Arlo Knott is slightly speculative contemporary fiction, and if you like authors such as Matt Hague and Naomi Alderman, it might be for you. Is available at all good book shops and online.

Currently on sale at Blackwells – buy it now!

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NEWS RELEASE

SRL signs ‘fierce, compelling, and utterly believable’ novel from Heather Child

In a shiny new country where popularity is prized above all else, can Tamsin – a shy tunnel engineer – resist its delights and outfox the narcissistic Governor to save her best friend from his cruel reality TV show, where the final really will be the end of her?

The People’s Republic of Love is set in a world in which celebrities and influencers have strung together a few private Caribbean islands to create their own country, where the person with the most followers on social media makes the rules (An Instagramocracy, if you will). Its about human friendship versus becoming a human TV channel with a flavour of Love Island (gone wrong).

“A chilling fable for the social media age – fierce, compelling and utterly believable.” – M R Carey

Heather Child is a Bristol-based author who grew up in the Midlands, her first two novels, Everything About You and The Undoing of Arlo Knott are high concept speculative fiction. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in various magazines and she is a mentor on the Word Space programme run by Literature Works.

Heather said, “I’m interested in both the draw of fame and how it can split a person in two. What happens when the self you’ve created for public display gets too powerful? In The People’s Republic of Love, celebrities and influencers have their own country – it was great fun to write. As someone interested in sustainability as well as storytelling, I’m so happy to be working with the world’s first climate-positive publisher.”

The People’s Republic of Love is set for release February 2026.

SRL Publishing is a climate positive, award-winning publisher based in the UK with a passion for storytelling. A British Book Award winner, SRL have a ‘breaking the silence’ ethos in which a lot of their titles aim to break down the barriers of conversation and get people talking about difficult topics in our everyday lives. Find out more about SRL here.

Read more about The People’s Republic of Love.

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It’s been a strange year – one of those authors go through sometimes – in which novel-writing has been slow or tricky, and instead I’ve done what I term the ‘marginalia’ of a writer’s life – other things that around the margins of writing actual books.

So this year, I’ve been a mentor on the Literature Works Word Space programme, supporting an excellent budding science fiction writer as he progresses with his novel. I’ve spoken on panels, including an interesting non-bookish one on AI for Altered State, bringing a speculative angle to the discussion.

I’ve also had a handful of short stories published, The Other Sky in Apparition Literary Magazine, Davy Jones and the SS Utopia in the Skeins anthology by Linen Press, and a couple in the Quite Weird anthology by Malago Press, which I’ll come to later.

For a couple of years now – maybe more – I’ve been writing my most tricky book so far – a complex dual-narrative, half-historical metafiction whose plot is as slippery as eels in butter. I still don’t know if I’m up to the task. It’s easy to come to the end of the year feeling rather glum, thinking you’ve got nowhere because you’ve had to put work aside, or begin yet another rewrite.

So it’s nice to look back over the year and realise I’ve done at least a few things, have continued as an active member of JustWrite Bristol, and been part of the literary scene.

Then there’s the small matter of Malago Press – the imprint founded by myself and other members of JustWrite, to publish a range story-led books from different genres, all managed from and born in Bristol. It’s something we’ve talked about for years, and now it’s finally off the ground, softly launched with the Quite Weird anthology and a series of crime novels by H J Reed. Watch this space for more imprint news.

Fancy a little escapism of the weirdest kind? Read or listen to The Other Sky

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A couple of weeks ago I was kindly invited by talks organiser Altered State to join a panel on Artificial Intelligence (AI), considering whether it is “the end of the world as we know it”.

My fellow panellists were experts on the subject – Colin Gavaghan, Professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol, and Nigel Toon, CEO of Graphcore AI. The Hen and Chicken in Bristol has a spacious upstairs studio that made a great venue for the event.

Since it has been some years since I wrote Everything About You – a novel about someone whose AI assistant knows everything about her and can make better decisions about her life – I took this opportunity to brush up on my AI knowledge.

What strikes me the most is how far-reaching AI has become. We have no control over the way it is an upstream influence in our lives – in the way our data is managed, in aspects of society that include recruitment, healthcare, the way crime is predicted, policed and prosecuted, and the way new drugs are developed, to name but a few. Many of these have a positive effect – for instance using AI to sift through countless protein structures to find that elusive disease-curing molecule.

When I was originally researching this topic, it became clear that one of the key benefits of AI would be to make sense of the ‘big data’ age. Currently, almost unlimited information can be collected about every aspect of society – and the natural world – but the sheer quantity is so staggering, so terrifyingly vast it becomes almost nonsensical. Human intelligence can only cope with so much, but that is where AI takes over – neural networks chewing through endless figures (and photos, faces, every kind of data) and coming up with conclusions about where the next hurricane will strike, or – less usefully – what kind of advert will make you click ‘buy’.

At the downstream end, there is the sort of thing I wrote about in my novel – the ‘intelligence’ we see in Google Assistant and other virtual helpers, to which so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can be added. These are the ones we are most likely to mistake for colleagues and friends, but they are really just data-fuelled prediction machines, or cobbling together the most likely combinations of words.

Here we get some choice in the matter. We can leave them well alone if we like, but as time goes on I sense that it will be harder to do so, and we’ll eventually have to find a well-judged comfort zone. There will be the option to let AIs plan not only our transport routes but also our meetings, workouts, haircuts, holidays and any other ‘life admin’. And if they do it better than us, and if we have more time for the good things in life, how important will it be to wrest back control?

The choice will be yours – grab the wheel, or sit back, relax, and be a passenger.

Photos: Freestyle Bristol

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Having enjoyed researching Isambard Kingdom Brunel for The People’s Republic of Love, I thought I’d take a rare venture into micro fiction, just to capture this fleeting yet fascinating episode in his life (a true story).

Gulp

In the process of entertaining the children with a magic trick that made it appear as though I was consuming a gold sovereign, I had, in error, actually swallowed the coin. It was lodged in my trachea, and I was aghast to hear that it posed a very real danger to my life. So it was that I had to swallow my pride and visit a physician.

Much to my surprise, the doctors could propose no effective treatment. Feeling rather foolish about the whole thing, and since I had created this problem, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Thus I had myself strapped to a board and mechanism which would allow me to be rotated at great speed. I spun like the needle of a broken compass, the centrifugal forces doing their best to pull my stomach up through my throat. But I felt that sharpness in my windpipe shift, and moments later the sovereign was shaken free, upwards into my mouth until, with great relish, I spat it onto the floor. Never has gold shone so brightly.

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“Is it a maze?”

“A lawn labyrinth,” he said. “A maze has lots of ways to reach the centre, a labyrinth only one.”

(Chapter 26, The Undoing of Arlo Knott)

Most of the time authors carefully choose their settings, but sometimes the story just revs its engine and takes you off somewhere. Hence I found, completely by accident, this one little scene in The Undoing of Arlo Knott taking place at an old workplace of mine – Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.

Arlo lives a mistake-free life, but when he finds himself in the garden of this old stately home, he is experiencing something that is nearly regret. He has come straight from a spell in Colombia clearing landmines in his own, ethically dubious way, and walking Woodbrooke’s lawn labyrinth was the perfect way to focus his mind on the implications of not putting a foot wrong. In the book, it’s a breathing space – a green oasis amid the hustle and bustle of Birmingham.

That’s exactly what Woodbrooke is – a green oasis, unexpected white chocolate walls just a treeline away from the busy Bristol road. I went there for the first time in a few years earlier this month. On that record-breaking hot September Saturday when every instinct told me to go to the beach, I hit the M5 instead, purely to visit an old workplace – what was that about?

Earlier this year I’d heard that Woodbrooke, rather unthinkably, is closing down at the end of October, so the Heritage Open Days weekend was potentially my last chance to see the place again.

It’s ridiculous, I know, to get so nostalgic about a mere workplace, but I was barely out of university when I started there as a marketing assistant, and when you’re young everything makes more of an impression. And Woodbrooke, in so many ways, is special.

Grade II listed Woodbrooke, like a writer’s dream, was built on pen-nibs. Or rather, that was how Josiah Mason made his money and could afford to have the mansion constructed in 1830. The clay was quarried from what is now the lake. Later the house was bought by George Cadbury once he had set up his chocolate factory in Bournville, and in 1903 he gave it to the Quakers.

Since then it has hosted everyone from peace activists to celebrities, notably Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. There was a myth that he lit a fire in his room for cooking and burnt a hole in the floor, the more genuine trivia being that he brought his own goat for milk (though it didn’t stay in room 12).

His visit is just one moment in a history that spans well over a century and is tangled with the roots of major movements – Quakers being major activists in everything from pacificism to climate change. It was a vibrant place, full of interesting, kind people. It was sometimes a challenging workplace, but in how many offices can you bring oars down to a lake at lunchtime and haul a tiny rowing boat out of its ancient boathouse?

I’ve never seen a lake so mirror-still as Woodbrooke’s, surrounded by its ancient woodland. It is, in every way, a place for quiet reflection. When I worked there we could barely move for tales of how it changed people’s lives, not only Quakers but also others who had come on a retreat or for a course, or even a conference.

So for me it was worth a few hours in a hot car to see the place again, the green oasis where Arlo Knott also unwittingly wound up while a police officer in Birmingham, investigating a theft of lead from the roof (which did happen). I spoke to staff, one of whom has been there 34 years, and felt the sadness of such a place closing its doors. I know Woodbrooke will have found its way into plenty of books, art and culture, far beyond its cameo in The Undoing of Arlo Knott. It’s that kind of place.

Woodbrooke… old and new

A few snaps from my recent visit, and some from times past. The book is a wonderful brief history of the house and garden written by gardener Barney Smith, which I helped to publish.

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If you live in or near Bristol, you probably know that the famous zoo has finally closed its doors after 186 years. Some of the animals are transferring to more appropriate quarters at the Wild Place just outside town, and some are moving to other zoos. A city centre location was never ideal for larger beasts, but I did enjoy going to see the meerkats and capybaras and other smaller creatures, and will miss the place.

To mark this end of an era, the zoo launched a short story and poetry competition, and I was lucky enough to win first prize in the adult fiction category. I was invited to an award ceremony at the zoo on its last day open to the public, where I met zookeepers and other prize winners. Some of the writing was displayed during the zoo’s last weeks, and they will be featuring it in the Clifton heritage hub that will remain on the site once it has moved.

It doesn’t feel right to reproduce the story here as the zoo have not yet published it, but I wrote a piece set in a fictional world without insects, imagining myself as an old woman looking back to when I was a teenager at the opening of Bug World at the zoo. There were local television cameras and Michaela Strachan attended as the guest of honour (this is a true story – I was there!) Flash forward to a future where people marvel at the colours of beetle shells and see insects as a precious treasure, not creepy crawlies to flick away.

It was a nice opportunity to write something a bit off-the-wall, and I’m very grateful to Bristol Zoo for running the competition and for choosing my piece.

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So far, my books have been sparked by aspects of contemporary life which rang quiet but persistent alarm bells. In Everything About You I asked what would happen if a virtual assistant knew so much about its owner that it could make all her decisions more effectively, and in The Undoing of Arlo Knott I considered whether we would be better humans if we could avoid making mistakes.

But the premise of my third book – about narcissism and celebrity culture – is potentially controversial. Have you heard it said that you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else? I’ve noticed this mantra fall from many a celebrity’s lips, and while it seems wise to value yourself and your achievements, I can’t help wondering whether this really is a prerequisite for loving other people. Aren’t there individuals with low self-esteem who still foster a deep love and admiration for others? What happens if you love yourself a bit too much?

In the The Narcissism Epidemic, Dr Jean Twenge takes readers through a fascinating journey into self-esteem extremes. You can be a happy narcissist, but you can’t really stop it affecting your relationships – anyone who has been in a relationship with a narcissist knows how bad things can get. And from a societal point of view, narcissism has a knock-on negative effect. Take SUV ownership – one person wants to have the biggest car and the highest road position, so other road-users are blinded by headlights and feel too low in their seats, and more people plump for a bigger car, until everyone is guzzling gas and choking in the fumes.

Unlike many writers, I tend to start with an idea and then create characters to whom it will matter. In this case, the book revolves around two best friends: a waning reality television star and a shy tunnel engineer. And the setting? I had fun with the setting. But first, a tweet I saw today:

In the UK we are feeling the effects of living under the most corrupt government since the second world war, so it is no wonder we are increasingly disillusioned with the establishment. This is the very feeling that Trump drew upon with his ‘drain the swamp’ rhetoric. For some people politics is becoming a dirty, dated word and, in an era in which everyone can do things their own way, on the great equalising platform of the internet, surely we could do better?

So in my third book a bunch of private Caribbean islands band together to create a brand new nation, the ‘People’s Republic of Love’, governed by the citizen with the most followers on social media. It is a sort of ‘Instagramocracy’ and, to stay in charge, an influencer just needs to stay interesting. They can legislate according to personal whimsy and no rules apply. Told you it was fun.

Anyway, the editing is complete, and the book is almost ready to be sent out into the world. By now the characters have overtaken the idea and the story has branched out into strange new directions – narcissism leading the protagonist to brilliant peaks and dark places.

The post Love, Narcissism and an Island Nation appeared first on Heather Child.

Can I get away with claiming that a writer is like a plant, in that they absorb the matter and atmosphere around them and process it into something new – hopefully something that grows of its own accord?

I think this is why so many worrying aspects of modern culture find their way into novels, things that don’t feel quite right. In my case, I chose to write about machines knowing so much about us that they can make our decisions more effectively, in Everything About You, while in The Undoing of Arlo Knott I probed the seductive nature of the ‘undo’ button.

I’m quite taken with the idea of Literary Darwinism – the idea that literature is something we use to explore potential threats. Free from the constraints of reality, we can take a concept and imaginatively carry it to extremes, examine the dangers it may contain.

But the premise of my third book – about narcissism and celebrity culture – is potentially controversial. It was when I read The Narcissism Epidemic that I realised there was any scope whatsoever for questioning the mantra – so entrenched – that you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else. Is that really true? Aren’t there people with low self-esteem who still foster a deep love and admiration for others? If self-esteem really is a prerequisite, then what happens when it creeps towards the other end of the scale… towards narcissism, which is well-known to be detrimental to relationships?

Unlike many writers, I tend to start with an idea and then create characters to whom it will matter. In this case, the book revolves around two best friends: a waning reality television star and a shy tunnel engineer. And the setting? I had fun with the setting. But first, a tweet I saw today:

In the UK we are feeling the effects of living under the most corrupt government since the second world war, so it is no wonder we are increasingly disillusioned with the establishment. This is the very feeling that Trump drew upon with his ‘drain the swamp’ rhetoric. For some people politics is becoming a dirty, dated word and, in an era in which everyone can do things their own way, on the great equalising platform of the internet, surely we could do better?

So in my third book a bunch of private Caribbean islands band together to create a brand new nation, the ‘People’s Republic of Love’, governed by the citizen with the most followers on social media. It is the world’s first Instagramocracy and, to stay in charge, an influencer just needs to stay interesting. They can legislate according to personal whimsy and no rules apply. Told you it was fun.

Anyway, the editing is nearly complete, and the book is almost ready to be sent out into the world. By now the characters have overtaken the idea and the story has branched out into strange new directions… and I can heave a sigh of relief that it has grown into something by itself.

The post Writer as plant: how my third novel grew appeared first on Heather Child.

Four authors, all part of the writing collective Just Write Bristol have been busy running our popular ‘Hidden Gems’ event for literature festivals during lockdown.

The panel session, in which we each share the three most amazing things uncovered while researching our novels, is something I developed because it is the kind of event I enjoy the most at festivals – where you learn something new.

So far we have brought the event to the Bristol Festival of Literature, Weston-super-Mare Literary festival and the Stay at Home Festival. Next on the list is Evesham Festival of Words, coming up on 9th June.

We delve into the secrets of famous Italian artists, the birth of photography, the Spanish civil war, landmine-sniffing rats, the mysterious ‘red gene’… and some astonishing quantum physics. So please get in touch if you are a festival organiser and would like something colourful for the programme.

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