The Unknowing

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Celebrated novelist Frances Oppenheimer has long been an enigma, a mystery even to her closest observer: her daughter. In the shadow of a family tragedy never spoken of, she has retreated even further, and her absence has loomed larger still.

Now turning to the page herself, Frances' daughter finds she cannot move beyond the one subject she has spent her life researching. Combining inherited stories, overheard conversations, family heirlooms, and scenes of her own imagination, she sets out to assemble a portrait that may at last bring her mother into view.

Precise and poignant, The Unknowing is a striking debut exploring how fiction refracts truth, how families create their own mythologies, and how we reinvent the people we love in order to understand ourselves.

From the first page of The Unknowing, the world of the Oppenheimer family opens up in all directions, with the brilliant, hermetic Frances at its core. Exquisitely crafted, incisive, and full of richly hued shadows and sudden depths, The Unknowing examines what it means to be an artist, a daughter, a mother—and the near impossibility of succeeding at all three.
Krystelle Bamford, Saltires Debut Fiction Award-shortlisted author of IDLE GROUNDS

The Unknowing is an unusually poised debut; its formal control and elegance put me in mind of Anita Brookner and the films of Joanna Hogg. It captures perfectly the equivocal gifts of family; the fundamental strangeness of being made and unmade by people we may never truly understand, the lifelong—and likely impossible—task of learning to bear the weight of our inheritances with grace.
Keiran Goddard, Gordon Burn Prize-longlisted author of I SEE BUILDINGS FALL LIKE LIGHTENING

About Eloise Poole

Eloise Poole is a writer and researcher based in Manchester. Her short fiction has been published by Banshee, Short Fiction Journal, The Manchester Review and elsewhere. In 2025, she was shortlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize and the New Writing North Arvon Award. The Unknowing is her first novel.

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