Louisa Joyner, Publishing Director, pre-empted world rights, all languages, from Niki Chang at The Good Literary Agency. Publication is scheduled for 4 February 2021.

Following two star-crossed lovers finding their way back to one another over a single day, This One Sky Day is set on a fictional Caribbean archipelago called Popisho. A sensual meditation on the nature of love and addiction, it is also a dazzling, funny and incisive disquisition on post-colonial politics.

This One Sky Day is a lightning bolt of a novel. It is hard to convey the beauty of Leone Ross’s writing, inflected with the rhythm of patois and an immersive sense of place in the landscape of Popisho. Ross’s use of language is daring, her imagination uncontainable. A playful love story about the one that got away, it is a major work of fiction in conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Junot Díaz via the Harlem Renaissance and Anaïs Nin.

Leone Ross said:

When you write a book for fifteen years you can be forgiven for fearing it will never be published. After all this time, I’m overjoyed to share it. It’s about longing and addiction; about the bad choices we make that we can change even at that final hour and about all the flavours of love.

Louisa Joyner said:

This One Sky Day is as rare and brilliant and fabulous as the imagined world it manifests. Good novels stay with you long after you finish them, but with great works of fiction a little bit lodges somewhere within. Leone Ross is a major new voice for Faber and the island of Popisho will carve a new space on the cultural map.

Leone Ross was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and her second novel, Orange Laughter, was chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her first short-story collection, the 2017 Come Let Us Sing Anyway was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM BOCAS Prize. Ross has taught creative writing for twenty years, at University College Dublin, Cardiff University and Roehampton University in London. She is editor of the first black British anthology of speculative fiction, due out in 2022 with Peepal Tree Press. Prior to writing fiction, Ross worked as a journalist. Leone Ross lives in London but intends to retire near water.

Photograph: Mahdis Keshavarz