What's in a name?
I am, unabashedly, obsessed with baby-names. I still have a baby name list on my phone, and still add to it, even though I won’t (can’t) have another baby. Luckily for me, my daughter is training to be a midwife and comes home with near daily dispatches from the delivery suite: the gorgeous, the gutsy, the gloriously baffling. So a novel built entirely around the power and consequences of a name? I was always going to inhale it. And I wasn’t disappointed. This is another that is going to be in my top ten for 2025.
This week we take a look at a standout debut novel - The Names by Florence Knapp
Knapp opens the story the day after the Great Storm of 1987: Cora, a young mum in a frightening marriage, sets out to register her newborn son. At the counter she hesitates—Bear (her daughter’s pick), Julian (her heart’s pick), or Gordon (her husband’s demand)? From that tiny pause, the book blooms into three parallel lives, tracked over decades, each version shaped by the name on the certificate. It’s a simple, irresistible premise, executed with so much control and compassion.
What I loved most is that the novel isn’t a gimmick. Yes, it’s “Sliding Doors” for baby names, but it’s also a deeply felt portrait of coercive control and the slow, complicated work of survival. The different timelines aren’t parlour tricks; they’re lenses. In one, the soft-strong Bear invites a kind of tenderness and danger. In another, Julian carries Cora’s hope for a freer future. In the Gordon line, the weight of inheritance is almost physical. The point isn’t which name is “right,” but how violence, love, class, and chance press in on a child as he becomes himself. The book keeps nudging us toward the uncomfortable truth that while names matter, the grown-ups and their choices matter more.
Cora is the emotional centre throughout. She’s an ex-dancer, hyper-vigilant mother, exhausted strategist. I found her almost painfully real: the way she edits her own sentences mid-thought, the tiny calculations she’s always running to keep the peace, the way hope leaks back in despite everything. Maia, the big sister, is a quiet triumph; her love is the book’s heartbeat. And Gordon… doctor, golden boy in public, tyrant at home, is drawn with chilling precision. I’ve seen others calling this a “devastating” debut, and I think that’s right, but what kept me furiously turning the pages was the current of radical tenderness running beneath it.
Formally, Knapp is clever without being showy. The timelines spool out in steady intervals, so you never feel lost; each return picks up a prior thread. The structure lets her ask big questions about destiny and agency without sacrificing story. There’s momentum here. scenes that thrum with dread, and others where relief arrives like air. The craft is confident, elegant, and always in service of the characters.
Because I am who I am (a name-nerd to my bones), I adored the novel’s quiet fascination with meaning: the animal warmth of Bear, the light-chasing romance of Julian, the generational weight of Gordon. I’ve spent years debating “nominative determinism”, do our names script us? (Not to mention the hours I toiled over my children’s names), and this book offers a humane, complicated answer: names open doors, close others, but it’s love, safety, and the stories we’re told about ourselves that do the heaviest lifting. If you’re reading with a book club, you’ll have a field day with that. (Also: prepare for everyone to confess their secret baby-name notes app.)
A note for sensitive readers: the depictions of domestic abuse physical, sexual, emotional are frank. They are handled with care, but they are there, and some scenes are hard to sit with. (Domestic violence is one of the things I find the most difficult to read, and I could read this, but if you’re also in this camp, proceed with caution). The novel is never misery-porn, though; it’s shaped by resilience and the stubborn insistence that lives can be re-written, even if not neatly.
Did I love the ending? I did. Did my brain immediately sketch my own alternate final beat? Of course. It’s not a criticism; it’s just my particular itch to keep playing the “what if” game. (The exact premise of this book no less!) If you’ve finished the book and want to hear my alternate ending, message me and we’ll compare notes
If you’re drawn to big-hearted, high-concept fiction that actually lands the emotion, think Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or stories that play with fate without losing sight of real people, this belongs on your bedside stack. Honestly, I cannot rave enough about this book.
And if you, too, keep a secret baby-name list on your phone… well, this one feels written just for us.
The Names is a superb debut and a conversation starter in the best way: about who we become, what we pass on, and the tiny choices that change everything, because life is too short to read bad books.