After a hotly-contested auction, Helen Garnons-Williams of Fig Tree has acquired Kathryn Faulke’s poignant and timely memoir EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE: A Journey into the Heart of Carework. Isobel Dixon brokered the deal for UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) and Fig Tree, a part of Penguin General, will publish in hardback, ebook and audio in July 2024.
EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE is the first-of-its-kind memoir of a home care worker, told through her encounters with the overlooked and often marginalised people she cares for. It recounts the experiences of Kathryn Faulke, a domiciliary care worker who left a senior role in the NHS, to take up what she thought would be a simpler job of caring for people in their own homes. But despite being determined not to become too involved with her 'customers', she soon found herself developing firm friendships, forging deep connections and bearing witness to the extraordinary drama to be found in ordinary lives.
With energy, compassion and hard-won humour, EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE gives an astonishing insight into this unsung – and often maligned – profession, and into the lives of the housebound and infirm. This beautifully written memoir is clear-eyed about the challenges facing the NHS and the care system, but it is, above all, a celebration of humanity and of the life-changing impact of caring, on those who offer it and those who receive it.
Helen Garnons-Williams, Publishing Director of Fig Tree says ‘We are so proud to welcome Kathryn Faulke to Fig Tree and to be publishing her powerful, beautifully moving account of working at the ‘coalface of human experience’. With warmth and honesty and (unsurprisingly) very great care, she illuminates and celebrates this undervalued profession and the often-disregarded people who depend on it.’
‘I’m thrilled to be working with Fig Tree to bring my early experience as a care worker into the public eye and shine a light on the profession that I have come to love so much,’ says Kathryn Faulke. ‘I would like people to understand not only the challenges but the satisfaction and joy to be found in doing this job that is so often swept under the carpet but is so vital to our communities.’
Isobel Dixon, Kathryn’s agent, says: ‘Kathryn Faulke’s story – and her compassion and humanity in bearing witness to the lives of others – struck right to the heart from the very first page. I knew this powerful and important book would be in the best of hands with Helen and the Fig Tree team and can’t wait for more readers to experience EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE’s particularly human magic.’
About Kathryn Faulke
EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE is Kathryn Faulke's first book. She was runner-up in the Wasafiri International New Writing Prize in 2020, and in 2021 she won the Mslexia Memoir Prize for an earlier version of Every Kind of People. She has now moved out of London but continues to work in care in the South-East of England.