Stuff happens. Events, dear boy, events. The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ authors gang aft agley. So it was that the 12 May launch of my debut novel TIME/LIFE at Daunt’s Bookshop in Marylebone, though beautifully organised, lost about half its confirmed attendees.

By “lost”, these guests were not hijacked by visiting aliens or teleported to the distant future, though the latter would have been appropriate to the book, a reframing of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine for the post-truth age. London suffered two extreme events that day: a substation fire and power failures knocked out a big chunk of the transport network, while a violent storm caused flash floods and brought traffic to a standstill.

Rainwater pooled at the feet of those doughty guests who did make it. Meanwhile I worried about a different kind of leakage. I used not to cry easily. Recent years have opened the floodgates. These days I don’t just weep, I blub, a comedic ugly-crying that transforms words into wailing whenever I try to talk about my lovely dead, so many people I love gone within a matter of years.

I could not introduce TIME/LIFE and fail to mention the ghosts in the room. This is a novel about time as a way of discussing love and grief. The fictional narrator Dory Silver mentions the real-life death of the musician Andy Gill—my husband and beloved for almost 30 years. Moreover friends at the launch would be aware that my mother and co-author of Good Grief, our memoir of twin widowhood in the pandemic, had died two weeks before the launch. I wanted to raise a glass to her but knew that to do so would tip me into sobbing.

I therefore adopted two strategies to stop that from happening. The first was to write down what I intended to say, never the best way to engage an audience, but an insurance policy against incoherence. My draft is at the bottom of this post. I did not, as it happens, deliver it as written, instead going off script and referring to it only occasionally.

The other technique was more successful. I prefaced the speech by telling a true story of something that happened after I split up with my only serious boyfriend before Andy.

The break hit me hard. I had moved to Germany to live with this man. Anyway, the news spread that I was now single, and someone I barely knew duly presented himself at the door, proclaiming his passion. Ill-timed and poorly judged in any circumstances and however he expressed his feelings, what made his declaration even odder was that he punctuated it with animal noises. Not all animals. Just farmyard animals. His therapist, he explained to me, had told him to cluck like a chicken or moo like a cow if he sensed his anxiety levels rising.

This, decades later, gave me an idea. I asked guests at the launch to cluck, moo, bark and caterwaul if I started to show signs of weeping. And they did—with enormous enthusiasm. Whenever I faltered, they raised the roof with animal noises, I laughed and was able to continue.

I think it went quite well in the end. The best laid schemes aft gang agley and what unfolds might just be as good or better.

The speech I didn’t give:

I thought my most stressful book launches were behind me. It would be hard to top the one in 2015 for my biography of the man who is now our king. In the days leading up to it, there had been an official serialisation of the book by the Times, an unofficial and wildly imaginative serialisation by the Mail, threats of lawsuits and a swirl of briefings against me by palace sources. I remember somebody saying to me, well at least you’ve got TIME magazine supporting you.

Or there was the 2020 launch of Good Grief, a cheery memoir by my mother Anne and me about widowhood in the pandemic. Lockdown made it impossible to do in-person events, so we’d be trying to talk about our book via Zoom with all the usual moments of audience members forgetting their cameras were on or that their kids had switched on bunny ear filters. Also doing interviews with my mother was quite a ride, especially because we were in different places, and I couldn’t signal to her. Those of you here lucky enough to know her will be aware that she had no filters, bunny ears or otherwise.

Anyway, I thought this launch would be much easier. After all, TIME/LIFE is a novel. As I wrote it, I remember thinking, nothing I’m writing is true, and nobody can come after me for it. What can possibly go wrong?

I started this book in February 2019 on a Gang of Four tour bus, not the most peaceful place to write except that only the driver would be awake before noon unless the band was doing a radio show or had an early soundcheck. I’d been obsessed with HG Wells’s The Time Machine for decades, and love speculative fiction, especially authors like William Gibson, Philip K Dick, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, and I started noodling about with my own take on time travel. In particular, I wondered how a Silicon Valley tech bro would exploit time travel technology. I knew what I would do with a time machine. I had lost people close to me. I would use a time machine to reconnect with my lovely dead.

So I started writing and unlike Wells who has only two female characters in his story, a housekeeper and a wilting maiden from the distant future, Weena, who does a lot of screaming and lapel-clutching, I centred women in mine, a female narrator Dory Silver, like me an ex-TIME journalist but not me, and a professor called Roweena. My time traveller is a tech bro, Elo Ó hAllmhuráin, with an outsized ego and influence. This may sound like an exercise in stereotyping but please believe me that this book is anything but programmatic. It flowed and constantly surprised me. The characters came alive to me and the worlds I created often felt more real and tangible than this one.

At the heart of the story, Dory is reassessing her life and separated by time and space from her beloved Morgen, is trying to find a way back before Morgen dies. Because Morgen has been afflicted by a virus. In a pandemic. Just to be clear, I wrote this in 2019.

Then, my stepfather died and just weeks later, my beloved Andy succumbed to what seemed, in an act of time travel, to be Covid. Andy had toured China with Gang of Four at the end of 2019, but authorities continued to insist that Covid had been contained within Wuhan, which he hadn’t visited.

Even before I realised the extent to which my fiction mirrored life—or death—I put the manuscript aside and couldn’t bear to look at it. The story of loss alone was too close to the bone. I’m not sure I would have ever revisited it, but two years later, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and I thought, hang on, did I dream this? Because in TIME/LIFE, Elo Ó hAllmhuráin buys a social media platform called Fleet.

I had also written about the rise of far-right populism, and the ways the media were normalising fascism rather than challenging it. I wrote about the impact of artificial intelligences, about worlds in which truth is elusive and we believe everything and nothing.

Much of the story has come true, all sorts of strange details. Here’s an example. As I said, there’s a character from the future called Roweena and at one point Elo tries to bend her to his will. He calls this effort Project Roweena. I nearly fell off my metaphorical chair listening to a Tortoise podcast called Elon’s Spies, when I learned that after Elon Musk got embroiled in a spat with a British cave diver over the rescue of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, he commissioned a company to dig up dirt on the caver. That initiative was called Project Rowena.

So much for me thinking fiction the safer option than nonfiction. I appear to have written our dystopian present and future.

On which note and before I get to my list of thank yous, an apology. If I made any of the current turbulences happen, if I somehow summoned up Trump and Musk like idiot demons or created Doge or sowed chaos and violence across the globe by imagining these things into existence, then I’m really sorry.

But here’s the thing. I believe in this book and its power not only to predict but to avert. One reason I am so passionate about TIME/LIFE is because I hope that by telling the story of what might happen, we can still change it. Also it is at its heart a love story and I want to share that because, well… we should all choose love.

I therefore have a favour to ask of all of you. Nothing about getting this book finished and published has been easy or straightforward. In the last four weeks alone, I’ve faced a series of challenges some of you know about and I won’t bore the rest of you with. Far worse, my amazing mother died on April 22. People keep telling me she wouldn’t have wanted to miss this launch. That’s true to a point but those of you who knew her will realise that what she really wanted to do was write another book with me. That’s the launch she didn’t want to miss and I’m sorry we didn’t get to do it.

But here the rest of us are, at the launch, and that is great, but it isn’t enough. There is a very real danger that this book will get no coverage, no pick-up and will disappear without trace. These days very few books ever cut through and those that do tend to be big ideas nonfiction or novels by big novel names with big publishers.

I am not a big novel name – this is my first published fiction – and Will Dady’s publishing house Renard Press is small and beautifully formed, a true indie, the incubator for some of the most exciting work I’ve read in recent years. I am so proud to be part of his roster, and a huge shout out here to my sister author at Renard, Bee Rowlatt, who introduced the magnificent Will to me. Please check out her brilliant book too, One Woman Crime Wave.

There’s nothing I don’t love about Renard, its daring, its beautiful cover designs (also by Will), its inclusivity and its commitment to climate-positive publishing. Yes there are plastic glasses tonight, but they are recycled and recyclable and we got to the decision to have them after factoring in overall impact of glasses hire versus using these. I’m not even joking.

But there is one downside: it is harder from an indie publisher, even one as fabulous as Renard, to get cut through.

So I’m afraid there is no such thing as a free launch. I am asking every single one of you to help me spread word of this book. Buy it. If you like it, recommend it in the most effusive terms. If you hate it, vent about it immoderately because bad publicity is better than none. Social media the hell out of it. Take gazillions of pictures tonight. If you have platforms, invite me on to them. Did I say buy the book? Buy the book. Buy it for everyone you know.

I am very lucky. TIME/LIFE is available in four formats. Three are from Renard. Tonight you can get your hands on the first copies of the paperback, which comes out officially on Wednesday, as does the ebook. There are still a few copies available too of the limited-edition hardback, a collector’s item.

Via my wonderful nonfiction publisher Lisa Milton at HQ Stories, there is also an audiobook, on Harper Audio. Thank you to the glorious Rebecca Fortuin for helming the audiobook project, the ludicrously talented Santi Arribas for recording and producing it and the excellent Annie Aldington, a legend in the audiobook industry, for voicing it.

Annie is going to read a short extract in just a minute, introducing readers to Elo Ó hAllmhuráin. After that, we’re going to play for you Rocket Men, a track Santi and I co-wrote with former Gang of Four singer John Sterry for Santi and John’s band Rear Window. It’s on their spectacular album Happiness by Design and it’s the theme tune to the audiobook.

Just before we do that, a few more thank yous.

To my brilliant agent Eleanor Birne. Thank you for all your help and support.

To my early readers including Nicola Jennings, Sian Williams and Noreen Blair, the last of whom who checked Elo Ó hAllmhuráin’s Irishisms for me, and to Jo Fairley who gave me notes that made the whole book better.

To Luke Jennings, Elizabeth Fremantle, Elif Shafak, Rachel Halliburton, Monika Radovejic and William Gibson for the kindest of blurbs. William Gibson really really likes my novel. I can’t believe it and those of you here who remember my dear dead friend Richard Flint will understand how badly I want to travel back in time to tell him that.

I miss so many people I love tonight and wish they could be here. One such, but only because she’s in Japan, is my partner in crime, Sandi Toksvig. You can hear her on the audiobook, a bonus feature, and she also provided a cover blurb but my favourite encouragement from her came when she first read it and texted “fuck, it’s good”. Will, I hope if we go to a second edition, we can put that on the cover.

Thank you to Tim Horrox and Monica Argenton and all at Build Hollywood for an amazing poster campaign. You rock.

Thank you to the fates for allowing me to live so long. If I hadn’t been travelling through time for so many decades, I could not have written this book. It is a song of experience as much as a prediction of experiences to come.

Thank you to Andy. If I hadn’t known the love you showed me, I am not sure I could have imagined it onto the page.

On which note and before I hand over to Annie, please raise your glasses to Andy and my mother and the lovely dead and to yourselves.