Ramsgate Lit Fest 26 · Friday 29 May · 7pm
The author of Dreamland returns with a tender, cinematic love story for a country on the edge.
The Book
It is Elle’s job to manage disasters, and lately things have started to spin out of control. At work, the latest catastrophe has been live‑streamed to the nation. A shock election sees an extreme‑right coalition storm to power. Then, on a night so hot it feels like London’s pavements are melting, she meets Ed.
Tender and cinematic, My Only Boy is both a once‑in‑a‑lifetime love story and an uncompromising state‑of‑the‑nation thriller, asking universal questions about desire, complicity and what happens when your sense of self collapses along with the world around you.
The Event
A reading, a conversation and a glass of something cold: an intimate evening with one of the most exciting voices in British fiction.
The Evening
My Only Boy is published on the 21st of May, and just over a week later Rosa Rankin‑Gee will be at The Book Hotel to read from it for the very first time. This is one of the very earliest public readings of the novel: a chance to hear the opening pages before almost anyone else.
Rosa will talk about the long road from Dreamland (her novel set in a near‑future Margate, now in production with the BBC) to My Only Boy: about writing a love story in a fracturing country, about life on the Kentish coast, and about what it takes to keep faith with characters who refuse to behave.
Books will be available to buy on the night, and Rosa will be happy to sign copies after the reading.
On the Night
An hour or so in the Waterloo Room with a writer at the top of her game: reading, conversation and questions from the floor. Warm, funny, sharp, and shot through with the heat of a London summer that feels uncannily close to our own.
A glass of wine is included with your ticket. Doors open at 6.30pm; the reading begins at 7pm.
This is a small, intimate event and the Waterloo Room only seats so many. We strongly recommend booking ahead.
Early Praise
‘Completely original. Read it.’Maggie Millner
‘What I admire most is the way its grand sweep is studded with small human moments: brilliantly noticed instances of the ways we want and yearn and love.’Chris Power
‘It stuns both on the intimate, human level and in its wider canvas. I can’t stop thinking about it.’Lucy Foley
‘A moving, complex love story set in an all‑too‑plausible future of intolerance, decline and precarity.’The Bookseller
About the Author
Rosa Rankin‑Gee is a novelist who lives between Ramsgate and London. Her first book, The Last Kings of Sark, won the inaugural Paris Literary Prize at Shakespeare and Company and was published by Virago. Her second novel, Dreamland, set in a near‑future Margate, is currently being adapted as a six‑part drama for BBC One under the title The Dream Lands.
My Only Boy, her third novel and her first with Scribner UK, is published on the 21st of May 2026. It is a love story and a state‑of‑the‑nation thriller: an unsettling, beautifully written portrait of a country (and a relationship) in flux.
Rosa’s writing has appeared in Esquire, Vogue, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Happy Reader, MacGuffin and Harper’s Bazaar. She is the daughter of the novelist Maggie Gee and the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin.
Join Rosa Rankin‑Gee at The Book Hotel for an early, intimate reading of My Only Boy: tender, urgent, and only just out of the printers. Friday 29 May, 7pm in the Waterloo Room.
Tickets
Tickets are £6.50 and include a glass of wine. Book securely online for instant confirmation.
Buy Tickets · £6.50Or email us at hello@thebookhotel.uk