Hero: A fierce and captivating literary love story for 2025 (Hardback) - Katie Buckley

Captivating, fierce, bracingly intelligent, Hero is a love story for our times unfolding in the week after a marriage proposal

Hero is a love story for our times: a novel that exposes the precious things women give up in order to be loved, and in order to be free.

'Fierce and thrillingly subversive' Financial Times
'The truest representation of the headiness and power of female longing I've ever read' Kirsty Capes, author of Girls and Careless
'Thrilling and dynamic' Andrew McMillan, author of Pity and Playtime

She's a waitress. He's a chef. They used to be best friends, but now, they're in love and living together in a studio apartment. She's also a selkie, Odysseus, and a cowgirl called Quick Fingers. He's a really good man.

When he asks her to marry him, Hero panics. She is lots of things but one thing she doesn't want to be is anybody's wife.

Drawing on a rich history of myth and legend, Hero is a story about what it means for women to be supporting characters in a world written by men. How can you be yourself when you are a product of other people's imaginations? How can you love another person and be free?

About the Author

Katie Buckley was born in Fowey, Cornwall, and grew up in Canada and the UK. She studied in Edinburgh, and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, where she was a Principal's Masters Scholar, and was a 2021/ 2022 London Library Emerging Writer.