The hours after reporting
A crime takes minutes. What follows takes months, and it is the months that decide whether a person feels believed.
A novel by Joe Hartwell
All God’s Kids
Three couples. One impossible year. And a question none of them expected to have to answer.
Approaching forty, and running out of time to start a family.
Where this book comes from
Written by a retired police officer, in a town like the one down the road, about the year three ordinary marriages stopped being ordinary.
Joe Hartwell spent his working life in the police. The arrest, the interview room, the crown court. None of it is researched in this novel, because none of it needed to be. What he has built around that experience is not a procedural. It is a story about three couples on the same half-mile of road, all of them privately arguing with their own lives at the same time.
Meet Joe Hartwell
- Setting
- An English town, present day
- Structure
- Prologue, 61 chapters, epilogue
- Told through
- Three couples and a midwife
The book
A child arrives.
Nobody can say whose.
Bridget Rawnsley has spent twenty years building a life she is proud of. In the space of a single night, someone takes it apart, and what grows out of the wreckage is the child she had almost stopped hoping for.
Then Bridget is attacked. She reports it, and finds that reporting it costs her almost as much as the attack did: the examination, the questions asked in a tone that makes her feel like the accused, the sense of a machine grinding on without her. Worn down, she withdraws the charges. Weeks later she discovers she is pregnant, and has no way of knowing by whom.
Her private crisis pulls in two other households on the same half-mile of road: a much older husband who has made his wife an offer most marriages would not survive, and a young probationary constable whose ambition and whose marriage are pulling in opposite directions. A nurse Bridget meets in a scanning room stirs feelings she has not allowed herself since she was a teenager. And in a delivery suite across the county, a devoutly Catholic midwife is waiting for a piece of paper that will test everything he believes about telling the truth.
Why this story matters
It asks the question every one of its characters is trying not to say out loud.
A woman is attacked and reports it, and discovers that reporting it costs her almost as much as the attack did. Months later she is holding a child she wanted for twenty years and cannot say where he came from.
That is the engine of the novel, but it is not really what the book is about. What it is about is the three men standing near that cot. One insists he could never love a child that was not his, one who has decided he would rather not know, and one who never thinks to ask. It is about a nurse who recognises something in a patient that the patient has kept folded away for twenty years. It is about a midwife with a religion that gives him a duty to the truth and no instructions at all about what to do with it.
Hartwell does not hand down a verdict on any of them. He puts consent, faith, fidelity and fatherhood in one room and lets them argue, and by the last page the argument has gone somewhere none of the three couples expected.
Six threads
What the novel is made of
Each of these is carried by a different household, and every one of them arrives at the same church on the same afternoon.
Consent
What a person did or did not agree to
The novel is unambiguous about the crime at its centre, and just as interested in what happens afterwards: the examination, the interview room, the questions that make a victim feel like a suspect. Bridget withdraws her charges not because she doubts what happened, but because the process has worn her down. What follows asks whether the system that exhausted her can still do right by her.
Fatherhood
Who a child actually belongs to
Three men in this story are raising, or refusing to raise, a child whose parentage they cannot be sure of. One insists he could never love a baby that was not his. One would rather not know. One never asks the question at all. The novel keeps returning to the same problem from different chairs: is a father the man in the blood test, or the man who stays?
Marriage
The bargains couples make in private
Every marriage in the book has an arrangement in it that its neighbours would not understand: a secret Sunday job, a permission granted in the dark, a suspicion never spoken aloud. Hartwell is less interested in judging these bargains than in watching what they cost, and occasionally in noticing that they work.
Faith
A conscience with rules attached
Melvin Todd is a midwife who has delivered more babies than he can count and has never fathered one. He goes to confession because he believes the sacrament means something. When he is handed information that could destroy several families, his religion gives him a duty to the truth and no guidance at all about what to do with it.
Desire
Feelings that do not ask permission first
A nurse in a scanning room recognises something in Bridget that Bridget has kept folded away since she was a teenager. Elsewhere a wife discovers she wants what she has been given permission to want, and a husband discovers he does not like being right. The book takes desire seriously as a force with consequences rather than as decoration.
Belonging
The word that gives the book its title
Three couples who began as strangers on the same half-mile of road end up in the same church on the same afternoon, holding children who arrived by routes none of them would have chosen. The line a priest speaks over them is the argument the whole novel has been building towards.
Every baby who is born, no matter how he, or she, is conceived, and however they arrive, they are all children of God.
What you can expect
Why read it
A story that refuses to make its people simple
Nobody in this novel is only one thing, and the book declines to tell you who to condemn.
Procedure written by somebody who was there
The arrest, the interview room, the crown court. The detail comes from a career, not from research.
A page-turner built on private questions
Whose child is this? What is owed to a marriage? When is a lie the kinder act?
Readers
Who this book is for
Not everybody, and deliberately so. Here is who tends to get on with it.
Read moreReaders of contemporary British drama
If you read novels that stay at kitchen-table level: money, marriages, work, the neighbours. This is that book with the volume turned up.
Readers who want the law in their fiction
The investigation and the courtroom are given room to breathe, written from inside the job by a retired police officer.
Readers who prefer complication to instruction
The novel puts consent, faith, fidelity and fatherhood in one room and lets them argue. It does not hand down a verdict on its people.
Readers who are not easily shocked
It is frank about sex and unflinching about sexual violence. It was written for adults and makes no apology for that.
Reader responses
What readers are saying
Reader responses will appear here
All God’s Kids has not been published yet, so there are no reviews to show, and none will be invented to fill the space. If you are a reviewer, bookseller or early reader, Joe would genuinely like to hear from you.
Submit a responseThe journal
Notes around the book
Pieces on the writing, the characters and the questions the novel keeps circling, including a plain note on what the book contains, for readers deciding whether it is for them.
Explore the JournalThe man who delivers other people’s children
He has brought more children into the world than he can count and has never had one of his own. Then he is handed a piece of paper.
Three doors on the same street
Half a mile of ordinary road, three front doors, and behind each of them an arrangement the others would not believe.
Media
For journalists and programme makers
There is no press coverage to list yet. The media page carries the biography, synopsis, cover artwork and enquiry route that a features desk or producer would need.
Visit the press room
All God’s Kids
Start reading where the year goes wrong.
Three couples. One impossible year. And a question none of them expected to have to answer.