Suckerfish
On sale
26th February 2026
Price: £20
A STYLIST and RADIO TIMES Most Anticipated Book for 2026
‘Brilliantly unsettling’ Marie Claire
‘Complicated, brilliant and achingly real . . . Suckerfish will quietly rip at your heart and then gently stitch it back up again’ The Skinny
There are women with higher callings than motherhood. And there are their daughters.
Kolia is in her twenties, caring for other people’s children and looking for a way out of London’s dead-end days. She is not looking to be pulled back into the orbit of her passionate, fiery, vulnerable mother, but she may have no choice.
In Kolia’s childhood, her mother loomed large, both saint and celebrity. Now, she will go to any lengths to repair relations with her estranged daughter.
A painful love letter to childishness, innocence and imagination, SUCKERFISH scrutinises what we really owe each other.
‘The archetypal working, absent, vindictive mother that society is so scared of is fully realised here in complex glory’ Jess Shannon, author of Cleaner
‘Lewis’s writing is likably feisty and alive, full of verve and pizzazz’ Guardian
‘Explores the knottiness of care and ambition with great empathy’ Sarvat Hasin, author of Strange Girls
‘Brilliantly unsettling’ Marie Claire
‘Complicated, brilliant and achingly real . . . Suckerfish will quietly rip at your heart and then gently stitch it back up again’ The Skinny
There are women with higher callings than motherhood. And there are their daughters.
Kolia is in her twenties, caring for other people’s children and looking for a way out of London’s dead-end days. She is not looking to be pulled back into the orbit of her passionate, fiery, vulnerable mother, but she may have no choice.
In Kolia’s childhood, her mother loomed large, both saint and celebrity. Now, she will go to any lengths to repair relations with her estranged daughter.
A painful love letter to childishness, innocence and imagination, SUCKERFISH scrutinises what we really owe each other.
‘The archetypal working, absent, vindictive mother that society is so scared of is fully realised here in complex glory’ Jess Shannon, author of Cleaner
‘Lewis’s writing is likably feisty and alive, full of verve and pizzazz’ Guardian
‘Explores the knottiness of care and ambition with great empathy’ Sarvat Hasin, author of Strange Girls
Reviews
In Suckerfish, every tender detail of a love between a child and parent comes alive. Ashani Lewis explores the knottiness of care and ambition with great empathy.
I savoured the prose. At once foreboding and meditative, each segment of Suckerfish is a window into a fully realised world: a Russian doll of narrative. The archetypal working, absent, vindictive mother that society is so scared of is fully realised here in complex glory. Lewis deftly manoeuvres between the horror and beauty of loving the mother terrifying, the mother critical, the mother magnificent: the one who hurts and loves you, and yet loves to hurt you.
Brilliantly unsettling . . . The more bound up in the toxic mother-daughter dynamic we become, what was a merely uncomfortable read becomes downright disturbing.
Lewis's writing is likably feisty and alive, full of verve and pizzazz, packed with crunchy observation and a wry kind of energy . . . This is a cry of pure rage, of fury and powerlessness.
Complicated, brilliant and achingly real . . . Suckerfish will quietly rip at your heart and then gently stitch it back up again.