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.

A Searing Memoir of Being Raised by Radicals on the Run

 

Zayd Dohrn, age 4, with his parents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, outside federal court in New York in May 1982.

NONFICION

A Searing Memoir of Being Raised by Radicals on the Run

Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s parents were leaders of the Weather Underground. His new book traces how their revolutionary ideals collided with their family life.Credit...

DANGEROUS, DIRTY, VIOLENT, AND YOUNG: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, by Zayd Ayers 

By Dana Spiotta

May 19, 2026

There have been numerous novels, films and memoirs inspired by the American radical left of the late 1960s and early ’70s, but Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s fascinating and affecting memoir, “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young,” stands out as definitive. Dohrn is both an outsider and an insider, having been born into the underground: His parents are the former Weathermen Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Dohrn’s dual perspective yields a meticulously researched history of an explosive time as well as a deeply felt, intimate portrait of a very unusual family.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY
Review

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn review – child of the revolution

The son of fugitive leaders of the militant Weather Underground recounts his chaotic, peripatetic upbringing

Peter Carty

Friday 26 June 2026

Every aspect of a family’s life will seem normal to the small children within it; only hindsight can bring what was abnormal into relief. Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s earliest years were spent on the run from the FBI; his parents were members of the revolutionary Weather Underground faction, a group dedicated to the overthrow of the US government.

National Bestseller / Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young

 

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

One of Literary Hub's "10 Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in May" and a New Yorker "Best Books of 2026 So Far"

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Robin Byrd demonstrating outside the Time/Life building in 1990. (Arty Pomerantz/NY Post Archives/Getty Images)

The wholesomely pornographic Robin Byrd sued Time Warner to keep her show on the air

‘Mr. Rogers meets Debbie Does Dallas’

Stephanie Buck

15 March 2017

The camera slithers over a pair of prostrate legs that glimmer with sheen. Her white fingernails trace a kneecap, tickle a tan thigh. She flips the side of her thong panties to reveal smooth, hairless skin. A belly chain twinkles underneath her breasts, which she’s tucked into a black crochet bra.

Porn star turned late-night TV icon Robin Byrd: ‘Sex is a form of magic’

She was a sex-positive star in the 80s and 90s who became an ‘accidental activist’ and her life is explored in a HBO documentary produced by Sarah Jessica Parker

Jim Barber
29 June 2026

Robin Byrd has no doubt about where the archive of her life should end up. “I think it should be in the Smithsonian,” she said. “I like to think big.”

 

Fire Island Pines People: Robin Byrd

Among the personalities known to frequent Fire Island Pines, none stood out quite like Robin Byrd. Robin Byrd is a former American porn actress and host of “The Robin Byrd Show,” a show that appeared on commercial-use cable television in New York City for over 30 years.

Anthony Burgess pictured in January 1987.MICHEL SETBOUN (GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

‘I should not have written ‘A Clockwork Orange’’: How Anthony Burgess came to disown his own novel

A recent documentary explores the conflictive relationship between the British author and his most popular work, which became a scandalous phenomenon due to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation

Photo essay: The beauty in small things

 

Motorbike trip with Manuel Pla, my husband. 1950s.BELITA GRACIA

Photo essay: The beauty in small things

Belita Gracia was one of the many women photographers who seemed condemned to oblivion until Ana Valiño discovered her story. From that fortunate encounter came an exhibition, the first major public recognition the León native received a few days before she died at 101

Virginia Woolf once wrote that “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” The work of Belita Gracia remained hidden throughout her life in albums she kept at her home in Barcelona. A few months after turning 101, much of her photography came to light in an exhibition in her hometown.

Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs review – the relationships that drove a genius

James Baldwin

Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs review – the relationships that drove a genius

This article is more than 2 months old

A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centre

Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’

 

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’

As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay

Sophie McBain

Sat 27 Jun 2026 

Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr help erase $550 million in medical debt for Californians

 

Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr in May 2026.Credit : 

Neilson Barnard

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr help erase $550 million in medical debt for Californians

By Queenie Wong

June 25, 2026