It was a mild, perfectly typical autumn afternoon when I met Roger Emms in the crowded Waterstones café on Gower Street, a short walk from his London home. The pavements were damp from a brief, forgettable shower; students drifted in and out with tote bags and half-formed essays; and the low hum of people sheltering among books created its own warmth. Briefly back from Grenada, Roger settled easily into a corner table—composed, observant, with the quiet intelligence of someone who has spent a lifetime watching people. He speaks the way he writes: measured, unhurried, uninterested in superficialities. His debut novel, About Your Daughter, is as fearless and unsettling as the mind behind it.
For thirty years, Roger has lived in the Caribbean, a place that quietly permeates his work. Before turning to fiction, he led a substantial professional life: founding a London-based healthcare research and consultancy organisation working across Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS policy, and other conversations governments often struggle to have. He has also worked in a children’s psychiatric hospital and supported a home for abused children. It is the kind of CV that could sound pious or self-important in the wrong hands. Roger does not perform gravitas; he states facts, then moves on.
About Your Daughter did not begin as a novel intending to provoke. It began, he tells me, with a tree. “I started with the silk cotton tree I know well,” he says. “A real tree, overlooking the harbour where the slave yards were. I imagined a girl—Kiwi—talking to it, consulting its age and wisdom. That was the story.” He pauses, amused. “Then Kiwi took over. And I let her.”
What followed is a daring work of literary fiction that inhabits the inner life of a pre-teen girl on a Caribbean island—her imagination, private desires, confusions, fantasies, vulnerabilities, and power. The silk cotton tree becomes her confidante, a gateway to a more complicated understanding of herself. Roger enters territory most writers avoid altogether, or approach only from a safe adult distance. He refuses both.
Kiwi’s story, he explains, grew from three preoccupations rooted in his long-standing interest in child psychology and the blind spots of adulthood. “There’s this idea,” he says, “that parents understand their young daughters—or even want to. But they often know very little about what’s actually happening in their children’s emotional or imaginative lives. Sexual development frightens people. They close the door on it and pretend the child has closed the door too.”
In About Your Daughter, Kiwi’s world becomes a site of collision: innocence and agency, fantasy and danger, curiosity and transgression. Roger avoids didacticism, offering no warnings, lessons, or endorsements. Instead, he attempts something bolder and harder—an act of attention. He tries to understand a young girl’s consciousness from the inside. “In literature,” he says, “young girls are often narrated by adults who want something from them. Or they’re moralised into symbols. What interested me was: what if Kiwi told her own story? What if we listened to her voice without cleaning it up?”
Nabokov inevitably comes up—not as a model to imitate, but as a literary problem to answer. “Dolores Haze didn’t get to tell her own story,” Roger says. “We only heard Humbert Humbert’s version. I wanted to imagine the girl who does get to speak, unfiltered. What would she insist on? What would she hide? What would she misunderstand? What would she exploit?”
Kiwi is portrayed not through an adult gaze of scandal or titillation, but through the shifting perceptions of a child trying to map unfamiliar impulses onto a world that offers her almost no guidance. She is naïve and knowing, vulnerable and manipulative, tender and—at times—cruel: contradictory in the way real children are, though adults rarely admit it. “She fascinates me,” Roger says, “not because she’s a symbol, but because she’s a child trying to make sense of adult behaviour she doesn’t yet have the tools to interpret.”
The novel also confronts the blindness of adults—their desire not to know. Kiwi’s parents, and the parents of her friends, move through the book with a touching and dangerous obliviousness. “Intergenerational silence,” Roger calls it. “We pretend not to see what we fear. But that doesn’t mean the child isn’t thinking—or acting.”
This uneasy mixture of misunderstanding and power is one of the novel’s most unsettling elements. Roger describes it calmly, without melodrama. “The stereotype is the older man exploiting the young girl,” he says. “But that isn’t the whole story. Children can be exploitative too—not because they’re wicked, but because they’re inexperienced, impulsive, emotionally uneven, and sometimes more powerful than they realise.”
About Your Daughter does not ask the reader to approve of anything. It asks only that they stay in the room—to resist flinching away from the discomfort of childhood interiority.
Was it difficult to write? “I didn’t think it would be publishable,” he says with a small shrug. “I was writing it for myself. And for Kiwi.” Most major UK literary agencies turned it down, which he took as a promising sign. “Algorithms,” he says, with a grim smile. “They like the predictable. Kiwi’s mother says the industry is full of sharks and cannibals. She was probably right—though she didn’t know about the robots.”
Foreshore Publishing, he adds, was the first publisher to read the manuscript as literature rather than a problem. “I wanted an independent publisher who wasn’t terrified of a difficult book,” he says, “who understood what it was actually doing.”
He looks around the packed café and smiles. “People underestimate readers. They underestimate what fiction can hold. Kiwi’s story isn’t written to shock—it’s written to make you think differently about what children know, and what they hide.”
When our conversation ends, the café has grown louder, the light outside beginning to fade. Roger buttons his coat, thanks me politely, and disappears into the Gower Street crowd. It’s a quiet exit—the opposite of the book he has written. Or perhaps exactly the same, if you notice the restraint beneath the boldness.
Roger Emms has lived in the Caribbean for over thirty years. Before turning to fiction, he worked internationally in healthcare research and policy, founding a London-based consultancy focused on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS across Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Alongside this work, he has maintained a long artistic practice. He has also worked in a children’s psychiatric hospital and supported a home for abused children. About Your Daughter is his debut novel.
About Your Daughter will be published by Foreshore Publishing in Autumn 2026.
