Queenie Is Working On It by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart sequel to a breakout bestseller

 

Candice Carty-Williams; the cover of 'Queenie Is Working on It'.Credit : 

Emil Huseynzade; Gallery/Scout Press

Book of the day

Review

Queenie Is Working On It by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart sequel to a breakout bestseller

Queenie’s ticking biological clock drives her chaotic misadventures in this sage and funny follow-up

Shahidha Bari

Tuesday 30 June 2026

Agynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorable begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mystery ailment that turns out to be a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, picks up the story eight years on, with the now 33-year-old Queenie back on the gurney, this time for a fertility checkup. “I didn’t realise they did condoms for anything other than … penises,” Queenie observes lamely as the unsmiling doctor sheaths a probe. Life has changed, but in many ways, Queenie has not.

Candice Carty-Williams / ‘People feel very attached to Queenie’

 

Candice Carty-Williams

INTERVIEW

Candice Carty-Williams: ‘People feel very attached to Queenie’

The breakout success of her debut created a publishing scramble for Black writers, but has that appetite for diversity endured? Carty-Williams talks about wanting to quit the TV adaptation, why now is the perfect time for her sequel

Emma Loffhagen

Saturday 20 June 2026

One of the questions Candice Carty-Williams has spent the past few years batting away is whether she is Queenie. It is perhaps inevitable: her best­selling debut novel followed Queenie Jenkins, a twenty­something south London journalist navigating heartbreak, racism, terrible men and an escalating sense that her life was slipping beyond her control. Like Carty-Williams, Queenie is south London-born, Black and works in media.

 

Candice Carty-WilliamsPAUL_GROVER

 This article is more than 7 years old

Interview

Candice Carty-Williams: ‘You get accustomed to men saying, "You’re pretty for a black girl"’

This article is more than 7 years old

The debut novelist struggled to find books about women like her, so she wrote one. She talks about interracial dating, white middle-class publishing and her love for social media

Fiona Sturges
Saturdady 30 March 2019

A

fortnight ago the writer Candice Carty-Williams was talking to a man on a dating app. They began to discuss meeting up, then out of the blue, he announced: “I like really strong ebony women and I want them to dominate me.”“This has happened to me, like, 100 times,” Carty-Williams says with surprising cheerfulness. “He was a white man. It’s only now that I’m old and wise enough to understand my value that I didn’t take that forward. The younger me – the girl growing up believing that black girls are not desirable except for sex – would have entertained that for a long time.”

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart and breezy debut

This article is more than 7 years old

A Londoner’s low self-esteem leads to a series of ill-advised flings in an amusing first novel

Anthony Cummins
Tuesday 16 April 2019

You can’t help but suspect that literary fiction short-changes readers when it comes to portraying black Britons. A novel such as Diana Evans’s Ordinary People, about middle-class midlife marital crises, felt radical mainly because the alternatives tend to be gritty or nothing: a choice between, say, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, about estate kids caught up in riots, or John Lanchester’s south London panorama Capital, without a black British character in sight.