Rediscovering ‘A Curious Child’
Richard Walker’s bold 1989 novel returns
In November, Amaurea will publish a new edition of Richard Walker’s A Curious Child – a bold and compassionate novel first released in 1989, remarkable for placing a transgender woman at its centre at a time when such stories were almost never told with empathy or depth.
In a Cairo clinic, Ronny recovers from gender-affirming surgery. Her grandmother, mother, and finally Ronny herself revisit their pasts, uncovering hidden loves, thwarted hopes and the emotional costs of respectability. The result is a strikingly humane exploration of identity, family, and the courage to live truthfully.
This new edition features an introduction by Dr Kit Heyam, historian and author of Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, who reflects on the novel’s historical context and the significance of Walker’s imaginative empathy.
When A Curious Child first appeared, critics praised its daring structure and emotional acuity:
“A remarkably daring first novel” (The Scotsman)
“Richard Walker is a master of the time-splitting device … an impressive first novel” (The Irish Times)
“An intelligent, thought-provoking novel … a welcome antidote to all those sweetness-and-light family sagas” (Forum)
“The prose is consistently exquisite” (The Times)
“Beautifully observed social tragi-comedy” (Punch)
To give you an advance taste, here is an excerpt from A Curious Child:
“The crucifixion may have been more agonising. But it didn’t last as long as this pain. And when mine is over I will hardly have the consolation of being called the Redeemer except perhaps by one or two of my friends. When this physical anguish has finished I will have to admit that I suffered the torment not to save others but only to try to rescue myself from a body to which I did not belong.
[…]
“What would happen if from the moment of your conception you had never once managed to enter your body and been given one to which you did not belong? This is not idle speculation but true in my case. I have never felt at home in the body conceived alongside me so I have, until now, spent my time with it in two ways.
“At first I tried to ignore the conflict between us and pretend that we were in harmony and had no quarrel. This led me into some painful contortions both mental and physical. The other way has been to tinker with the body assigned to me so that it more nearly approximates to myself. Most tinkering has something of the element of window-dressing about it and does not really get to the heart of the matter, being in essence a temporary stop-gap which may appease for a while but is, ultimately, only a frustration, an insubstantial mockery of what ought to be but isn’t.
[…]
“How meticulously have I placed my feet dancing round what doctors call one’s case-history. At the beginning I drew the curtains open just a fraction giving you a glimpse of my case and a morsel of history, a radiating web which casts almost invisible lines everywhere: events throwing pencil-fine shadows across my path. But then I grew reticent, fearful, and retreated into the ditches of generalisation, non-event, thinking that you wouldn’t like what you saw, or worse, would misinterpret.
“Show courage, get back, tell staring them straight in the face just as you had to acknowledge yourself to someone who didn’t look like yourself in the mirror.
“How far back does one have to go to get at the roots of a truth?...
“Two women were the poles I swung between, confused and spinning out of control like giddy sycamore wings at the mercy of a high wind…
“It is hard for me to gauge which of the two women has exerted the stronger influence. At times I felt like the seas of the earth, sloshing this way and that, sucked from one part of the globe to another by the magnetism of the moon. Now, I hope, after the tumultuous waves of pain, that things will settle down and become a little calmer.”
Nearly four decades on, the novel’s emotional truth and insight feel as urgent as ever. We will be publishing this new edition of A Curious Child on 20 November, with a launch at the Oxford Indie Book Fair on 23 November.
Richard will be at the Fair, signing copies of both A Curious Child, and his memoir Highlife, & my other lives, published earlier this year by Amaurea. If you’re in Oxford that weekend, do come and say hello.