Following their yearly tradition, The Observer (The Guardian) has released its list of Best New Novelists for 2025 (previous picks include Sally Rooney, Douglas Stuart, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Bonnie Garmus)! This year, British-Jamaican writer and Pontas client Marcia Hutchinson is among those selected, for her debut novel The Mercy Step, which will be published as a lead title by UK publisher Cassava Republic Press on July 22nd. North American rights, all translation and audiovisual rights are currently available.
According to Observer critic Kadish Morris:
"[The Mercy Step] is dark, humorous, and passionately captures the unique realities of the northern Black experience. Powerfully told from a child’s vantage point, the storytelling is imaginative and animated, yet piercing in all the right places."
The Mercy Step is fiction but closely based on the author’s own life growing up in 1960s Bradford, in the north of England, with her Windrush generation Jamaican parents. It is also a blood, sweat and tears exploration of a girl escaping a traumatic upbringing but doing so with her humour, style and verve intact. Mercy is prestigiously intelligent and has a clear-eyed yet innocent attitude towards the adults in her life.
This is a special debut by an author who has lived many lives; Marcia Hutchinson was the first pupil from her school to go to Oxford University and worked variously as a lawyer, a publisher, a community activist and a Labour Councillor (earning an MBE in the process) before becoming a full-time writer and active member of the Black Writers’ Guild. She is the co-author with Kate Griffin (under the pseudonym Lila Cain) of the historical fiction novel The Blackbirds of St Giles, published by Simon and Schuster in 2025. The Mercy Step is her literary debut as a solo writer.
For more information about the above title, please contact Carla Briner (carla@pontas-agency.com)