Your Life Without Me
James Meek
Available as Hardback, Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
12 February 2026
The Orwell Prize-winning author is back with a powerful, modern novel about the nature of loss and change
An explosive modern novel from the award-winning writer of The People’s Act of Love
Mr Burman is unmoored. Still reckoning with the death of his wife Ada, and struggling to understand his grown-up daughter Leila, he finds himself on a train to London, at the invitation of the police.
He is to meet Raf, a young man suspected of trying to blow up St Paul’s cathedral - and a man once intimately connected with the Burman family. Have the police laid a trap?
Compelling and compassionate, this novel follows Mr Burman’s journey towards the mystery of a radical act and into the true nature of his own family. It asks what a person leaves behind when they’ve gone, and how much of the past we can carry with us into the future.
“James Meek is one of our most consistently brilliant and thought-provoking writers. This is his best novel yet - a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth”
Alex Preston
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“James Meek is a master of the art of the stealthy narrative, and his keen intelligence and alertness are evident on every page of his new novel … Heart-breaking”
Rupert Thomson
”Your Life Without Me follows a retired schoolteacher as he tries to discover whether it was his influence that landed a favourite former pupil in prison for a radical act of destruction … A novel that is a profound and unsettling take on modern life by a writer at the top of his game”
Kirsty Lang
”Praise for James Meek: ‘A glorious imaginative feat … Rarely have I been so captivated by a novel’”
Sarah Waters On To Calais In Ordinary Time
“A story so original and so fully imagined”
Hilary Mantel On To Calais In Ordinary Time
James Meek
James Meek is the author of seven novels including The People’s Act of Love which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. It has been published in more than thirty countries. Meek has also written two collections of short stories and two books of non-fiction, including Private Island which won the 2015 Orwell Prize. In 2020, To Calais, In Ordinary Time was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. He is a Contributing Editor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the Guardian and New York Times. He lives in London.
@meekajam | @jamesmeek.bsky.social