Jude Cook discusses his new novel, Time Being
by Tim Relf
With the countdown on to publication of Jude Cook’s ‘existential’ literary thriller, Time Being, House catches up with the acclaimed author to find out what makes him tick
1. Tell us a little about your new book
Time Being is a short literary thriller that follows a London philosophy lecturer, Esther Luck, in the months after her friend and colleague Laura Cameron is murdered on campus. To complicate matters, Esther is fighting cancer and is at a stage in her life where she’s questioning everything. She also knows more than she’s letting on about Laura’s fate, so in that sense she’s an unreliable narrator.
2. Where did the inspiration for it come from?
The book began as an attempt to write a short ‘existential’ literary thriller in the mode of Patrick Modiano or early Ian McEwan. But it developed into something more philosophically searching, with a female protagonist at its centre, grappling with time, mortality, notions of free will and her own past. So in a sense it was a challenge that I set myself. Ottessa Moshfegh spoke of doing something similar with her novel Eileen, in that she wanted to use the framework and machinery of a thriller while retaining the register and psychological penetration of a literary novel.
3. How does it differ from your other novels?
My first two novels, Byron Easy and Jacob's Advice, both featured first-person male narrators, while this one has a third-person female narrator, so it’s radically different in that respect. The thriller component doesn’t feel so alien though, given that both my previous books were carefully plotted and had a revelation at their core.
4. Time Being is your third novel - does writing fiction get easier or harder?
It’s harder, or just as hard, every time. The question is always: how do you do this again? You never become accomplished in the sense that, say, an experienced plumber becomes better as they go along. It’s a cliché to say each book teaches you how to write it, but it’s true. And sometimes you never really find out. All novels are the wreck of a good idea, as Iris Murdoch once said. Also, as you get older, you feel the energy levels necessary for a long project diminish.
5. What books and authors made you want to be a writer?
My first literary heroes were heroines: Woolf and Plath. The Waves, Ariel and The Bell Jar were revelatory when I encountered them at sixteen. Just the possibilities of language, of inhabiting consciousness on the page, were astounding. All I’d really read up until then was Ian Fleming. Later, in my twenties, the cool young writers of the day – Hanif Kureishi, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson – took over as role models.
6. What is your comfort read? The book you reread the most?
The Buddha of Suburbia by Kureishi. I have read it countless times, and it never fails to inspire the same excitement as when I read it aged twenty-three in London, trying and failing to get a band together and not get evicted from my mouldy Camden Town bedsit. The book was a hilarious, politically acute blast of irreverent energy. It said: you can do this – you can be an artist; you can be whoever you want to be.
7. Which book would you give as a gift?
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata. In one hundred short pages, Kawabata packs in more emotional complexity than most novels three times its length. It’s also a piercingly beautiful book, full of startling imagery, as well as a meditation on fading tradition and a country undergoing radical socio-economic change.
8. Which book would you never read again?
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The first two hundred pages are solidly involving and wonderfully accomplished. Psychological realist fiction of the best kind. And then the rest is hijacked by harrowing descriptions of abuse and debasement that make me shiver to recall them.
9. What are you currently reading?
I’m trying to write a novel set in America, so I’m reading two works of non-fiction that centre on road trips across the USA. Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, recently rereleased by Penguin, and Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound, published in August by Fitzcarraldo. Both are stunning. I'm also reading the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Colette’s The Vagabond, bought principally because it has a very good introduction by Helen Southworth. And Zombie Proust, a concise exploration of the world’s most unconcise writer, published by Les Fugitives in the summer.
10. As a creative writing lecturer, can you share a couple of pieces of advice for aspiring writers?
The ‘crappy first draft’ has become an orthodoxy in creative writing, and I always advise my students against it. Unless you're a very good or experienced editor (which you’re not likely to be at eighteen), splurging 70,000 words onto the page and hoping you can reshape them retrospectively is more likely to undermine your belief in your own talent rather than reinforce it. I suggest they go away and read Zadie Smith’s great essay ‘That Crafty Feeling’ which offers an alternative way of approaching writing fiction, which is to build up the canvas slowly and surely as a considered composition, much as a painter would. I also suggest they use as many adverbs as they want (as did F. Scott Fitzgerald) and tell as much as they show (as did George Eliot).
11. How did you fit in writing Time Being with all your other commitments as a teacher and now publisher with Conduit Books?
With great difficulty! Teaching in a university is not just about the contact hours in the classroom, but the admin burden, as well as marking and supervising dissertations. It's hugely time-consuming, as is running a small press. We received a deluge of submissions – over 1,500 from around the world when the call went out in May. And I'm still going through them in October, even with the help of two assistants.
12. Does your background as a musician and songwriter influence your writing at all?
Only in the sense that it illustrated the longevity of art and the importance of getting it right, as well as sticking to your guns. It's thirty years since Plastic Jewels, the debut album by Flamingoes (my old band), was released. It still has its fans now, and what’s more I can listen to it without embarrassment. As Bruce Springsteen protested when record co execs tried to take the brass off Born to Run: ‘The record's forever, man . . .’
13. How healthy is literary culture now with rise of BookTok and AI? Is there a future for the novel?
Very healthy. I still believe the novel (to quote Lawrence) is the Bright Book of Life, and that there’s no other artform that reflects how we as human beings experience existence. BookTok will become more effective when it stops just focussing on a narrow range of genres. The rise of AI, on the other hand, is the worst thing that’s happened to the creative industries for decades.
14. What are you working on now?
Substack essays (for which I try to write something substantial every month) and a novel set in America, as previously mentioned. I've just finished writing a memoir (about how my childhood obsession with James Bond helped me and my twin brother survive our parents’ divorce), so it’s good to be back in the land of the unbridled imagination.
15. What is your writing routine?
Always the early morning, though for many years it wasn’t. I try to get to the desk between 6.00 or 6.30 a.m. However, I often have to stop early now. I’m co-parenting my eight-year-old son, and when he’s with me, my writing day ends after an hour at 7.30 a.m.
16. Finally, tell us something about you not many people know!
I wrote my first novel at thirteen, an abysmal occult-horror saga set on the Channel Islands, inspired by James Herbert. I wish I could locate the only copy of it so I could ceremoniously set it alight.
Time Being, a taut and thought-provoking exploration of guilt, mortality, freedom and time, will be published by Salt in September 2026.
Jude Cook is the author of Byron Easy (2013) and Jacob’s Advice (2020). He writes for the Guardian, The Spectator, Literary Review, New Statesman, TLS and The i Paper, while his essays and short fiction have appeared in Stockholm Review, The Moth, The Tangerine and The Honest Ulsterman, among others. In 2017, he was longlisted for the Pin Drop RA short story award, and in 2018 for the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award. He is an editor for The Literary Consultancy and teaches creative writing at the University of Westminster. He lives in London.
Tim Relf’s work has been published in leading poetry journals such as Poetry London, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Rialto and Stand. He is a former poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden, and an alumnus of Faber’s Advanced Poetry Academy. As a journalist, he writes about books for publications such as The Guardian, Poetry News and The Bookseller. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, was translated into more than 20 languages.
