Event Details

Novelist and academic Nat Reeve reads from their queer neo-Victorian novel, Nettleblack, and introduces new and forthcoming work.

Novelist and academic Dr Nat Reeve reads from their queer Neo-Victorian novel Nettleblack, and introduces new and forthcoming creative work.

Nettleblack, Nat’s debut novel (2022), is a subversive and playful exploration of Victorian queerness, in which a nervous Welsh heir/ess runs away from a marriage plot, enlists in a ramshackle detective organisation, discovers herself anew in this chaotic new context, and – like so many flustered nineteenth-century protagonists – documents the experience in an epistolary novel.

Described by Preti Taneja as ‘fresh, witty, and wildly original … an unforgettable debut’, and by Eley Williams as ‘a vivid, entirely engrossing story where subterfuge, scurrilousness, skulduggery and sincerity zip through the pages’, Nettleblack delves into the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you’re struggling for words – and also on the run, with a bloodthirsty ferret, in a small town with surprisingly big problems.

Nat will also be sharing new work, including from Nettleblack’s sequel, in which a cravat-designing dandy finds themselves caught up in detectival disarray of spectacular proportions.

Dr Nat Reeve (he/they) is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, a published novelist, and an academic working in Victorian Studies. Nat has an AHRC TECHNE-funded PhD in English from Royal Holloway, University of London (2023), and their debut novel Nettleblack was published by Cipher Press in June 2022. Nettleblack was a Book of the Year at the LRB Bookshop and Blackwell’s Manchester, and a Bookseller Fave of the Year at Waterstones Trafford Centre; Nat’s currently writing the sequel for publication in 2024.