The Hope and Anchor
By Julia Kite
When a vulnerable young woman goes missing, her girlfriend discovers how little she knows of life, love, and London.
Publication date: February 2018
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Two crucial parts of Neely Sharpe’s life are missing: Her once-great potential and her girlfriend, Angela. A failed academic turned frustrated office drone who had assumed that once she made it to London, she would be somebody, Neely finds herself tasked with a job finally suiting her intellect – piecing together the hidden life of the working-class, epileptic, and quietly devoted woman she loves. As the crucial days of Angela’s disappearance pass, Neely excavates Angela’s secrets, uncovering a sister who pushed her family away, a father obsessed with immortalising it, and a smattering of locals who don’t let their own problems get in the way of poking around in those of others. In search of answers as to what happened to her girlfriend - and why - Neely scours the city, from parks to pubs to the sewers in a snowstorm as the two women’s networks of friends, family, and old adversaries intertwine. In order to find any answers, Neely risks losing all the illusions she so carefully cultivated about what her life should be – but for the generation that was promised so much, one thing is certain: there is nothing worse than being a nobody. The Hope and Anchor captures the dreams London embodies for its natives and newcomers alike, and what happens when the dreamers finally have to wake up.
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Julia Kite
Julia Kite lives in Manhattan, and calls New York City and London home. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Obsessed with cities and the people in them, she started her career researching housing and urban regeneration, and she now directs policy and research for a transportation improvement organisation. Before she began working to make New York City’s streets better for cyclists, she was taking long rides along the Grand Union Canal in West London. She is a member of the Columbia Fiction Foundry, an alumna of quiz shows The Chase and Jeopardy, an urban wildlife rehabilitator, a keen amateur baker, and the owner of an opinionated parrot. The Hope and Anchor is her first novel, a work of fiction about a very real place she holds dear.
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If Angela is not in, then it makes sense to Neely that she must be out. Basic logic, common sense. Any idiot could figure that out, and Neely thinks herself more than a scratch above any idiot, and so she locks the door and hits the pavement in the evening chill. Neely does the Harrow Road door-to-door, a tour of the pubs and their yellow-lit insides. Why might Angela be in the pub? Again, logic: she might be in the pub because she is definitely not in the flat, and if she is not in the pub, then that will be one less place left to look afterward. Simple as.
A peek in the Barlby Arms: no Angela. Not on either side of the wrap-around bar, which splits the pub evenly down the centre and gives it the only bit of charm to be found within its walls. She is not sitting by the old men watching the cricket, nor is she among the tracksuited wasters around the snooker table. The Windsor Castle: no sign of Angela Archer. No sign of anybody in particular, because the clientele right now certainly count as nobodies. Neely recognizes them. The gingery one with the broken nose and the fingers shakily looking for something to scratch is called Rob, a fitting name for someone whose only useful skill seems to be thieving. His girlfriend, Alex, another Alex like Neely’s brother Alex and Angela’s brother Alex and so many others born in unimaginative years to unimaginative parents – well, strictly speaking, not Neely’s parents, they came up with fucking Neely – sits across from him. Her lips are split again. Rob isn’t responsible for that. He’ll bust anybody except his girlfriend, and he’ll especially bust anybody who looks at her sideways. Neely knows this. She’s seen it happen on the corner of Harrow Road and Elgin Avenue just around kicking-out time. Alex has spoken three words to Neely in all her life: “Black don’t crack,” with a cackle, when she saw Neely staring at a scrape on her cheek one night during a pub quiz. But it just did, Neely thought back, smiling only to be polite. Rob and Alex weren’t playing. They never did.
The pub quiz tonight isn’t at the Windsor Castle, though. It’s down the road. Rob and Alex always migrate pub to pub, wispily, like Neely is doing now, and as she leans her full weight into the door of the Hope and Anchor and grunts it open, the heat and the noise rush to meet her. Melanie the barmaid’s eyes do, too. Her face registers relief for a split second before she covers it with an asinine grin. On this night, she serves as quizmaster and ringmaster of a human circus with far too many coked-up amateur clowns and no safety net beneath the trapeze. Mel is in fact younger than Neely, Angela’s age, but her overall appearance is that of a once-stunning outfit that has been put through the wash twice as often as recommended, and on a turbo spin cycle at that. She has both faded and sagged considerably from the last time she and Angela Archer shared a classroom at Sion Manning School. Her ankles are too thick for her high heels, which are too high for any practical purpose and make her wobble on the carpet. The broad, inexpertly-applied highlights in hair pulled tight against her skull give the impression her head had been burnished by a sculptor who quickly lost interest and moved onto the next project before finishing the first. The overall effect screams, from every curve: I will grow old here and I will die here and when that happens I will be doing the exact same thing I am doing now. And right now, she is verbally wrangling a speeding skinhead who has greeted Neely’s arrival with nothing less than the facial equivalent of a raging hard-on.
Julia Kite has written 2 private updates. You can pledge to get access to them all.
24th May 2018 Updates and a request...Hello everybody. I hope you’re enjoying spring. May has been an eventful month - for those of you in the UK, I have a feature in Writing Magazine about how failure ultimately makes your work stronger, and how only by having what I thought were my failsafe plans for life crash and burn was I able to write a more well-rounded book. Also, if you know any readers in the UK, Australia, or Canada who might…
8th February 2018 The end and the beginningOne morning roughly a year ago, I sat down at the kitchen table with my coffee and checked my mail on my phone before getting ready for work. Nestled between one piece of spam and another was a message regarding a submission I’d made to a publisher several weeks earlier. After years of hearing no, no, no thanks, not for me, I just don’t love it enough, and no, Unbound was saying yes.
Yesterday…
15th August 2017 Editorial update and some current eventsHello Pledgers!
I want to let you know that THE HOPE AND ANCHOR is currently undergoing some final edits as we prepare for publication. Unbound's top-notch editorial team had some brilliant suggestions that I'm working on implementing in order to make the book as strong as possible. You get only one shot at your debut, so I'm determined to do this properly! When you've been immersed in your manuscript…
19th June 2017 100% funded!Hello everyone! THE HOPE AND ANCHOR hit full funding on Saturday and to say that I'm floored would be the understatement of the year...
Again, a massive THANK YOU for your support. Those of you who know me are well aware just how much this means to me, because I've been going on about writing for years. Those of you I haven't met yet, I'm thrilled you believe in this book and I can't wait for you…
8th May 2017 The Hope and Anchor in the Huffington PostHello everybody!
I was recently interviewed by David Henry Sterry and Arielle Eckstut, "the Book Doctors," for the Huffington Post. I discussed my long journey to Unbound and some thoughts on publishing. Check it out - I hope the advice to writers is helpful!
Click here to read: Julia Kite on Tottenham Hotspur, Rejection, and Her Long, Strange Trip to Getting Published. And if you are a fan…
11th April 2017 Halfway there!Hello! A video message from me on this gorgeous day in New York. Forgive the upspeak, but I'm really that happy, y'know? We hit 50% last night and I'm incredibly grateful to all of you who have pledged. Please help me maintain the momentum and spread the word to anybody you know who might be interested!
I also wanted to share with you a visually-stunning but very gloomy near-elegy for London…
1st April 2017 Thank you!To everybody who has pledged so far, I want to let you know just how grateful I am. This project has been several years in the making and I can't wait to see the final book with all your names in it. To be 28% of the way funded in just five days is thrilling, and I'm hoping I can sustain the momentum! It's also very humbling to see people I've never met pledging a copy. This is the kind of thrill…
These people are helping to fund The Hope and Anchor.
Danielle Petras
cc Lubetkin
Elaine Chambers
Patrick Kincaid
Hayk Gyuzalyan
Ritamary McMahon
dolores kite
Meghann Jones
Ellen McDermott
Sharon Chin
Paul Walters
Peter Kaufman
An anonymous donor
Paul Holbrook
Christina Smolen
Basia Suroż
Peter Hicks
Jonathan Hull
Ivy Moya
Tricia Zion
Grace Laidlaw
An anonymous donor
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