‘Why Q Needs U’: New book due for release in October!

At last, the cat has been let out of the bag: my first book, entitled Why Q Needs U, is due for publication at the start of October this year!

The announcement appeared in The Bookseller yesterday, which shared a few details about the book and its bewildered author, and started the marketing countdown to October. It looks like it’s even available for pre-order already!

To be able to share this news is, safe to say, a huge relief, as well as an overwhelming joy. The road to publication has been long, over a year in duration, and having to keep this piece of work and new career direction under wraps has not been fun. Now I can tell the world about this upcoming book that I am admittedly very proud to have produced. The warm reaction on social media has surpassed my expectations, and I have felt such gratitude today for having received this support.

The story of Why Q Needs U begins back in 2023, and includes several months of solid writing, seven days a week, over the summer of 2024. That period came immediately after finishing work on my PhD, and went right up to the start date of my current job at Radio Prague. Stressful it may have been, but it was a privilege to be able to dedicate those months to the book. It proved to me that when researching and writing, I am truly in my element. I would rather like to stay in that element for the rest of my life, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I put my whole heart into this project, and I feel keen yet nervous to offer it up to the world. I earnestly hope that it will successfully communicate information, enthusiasm and a positive impression of humanity’s linguistic brilliance, and that it will pay back certain people for their belief in the idea – chief among them being my wonderful agent Jaime Marshall, who believed in me and the book long before I did, and without whom Why Q Needs U would simply not exist.

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So, what’s it about?

This book is crammed full of history and linguistics, which hopefully I have made accessible to a broad, non-specialist audience. The history ranges from the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt to the present day, and further still up to unknown languages of the future. Phoenicians, Vikings, Etruscans, Franks, Romans, Greeks and Normans all get their moment in the spotlight, as do less well-known developments in historical speech, like Latin palatalisation or Ionic psilosis. I was keen not to shy away from discussing such linguistic concepts – anyone can understand them, provided they’re introduced properly. Let’s see how well I did.

All this information is included in the effort to answer two key questions:

• Where did we get the alphabet from?
  • Why do the letters have those shapes? And those specific sounds? And that order in the alphabetic sequence? Who do we have to thank/blame for our alphabet?
• And why does English use it so strangely?
  • Why does a silent final E turn a hop into hope? Why are the Cs in circus pronounced differently? Why is there an L in salmon and a K in know? And why indeed does Q so depend on U?

One of these questions would be enough to write a book on, but I believed that a combination of the two for a general English-language audience had not been attempted. Besides, the answers to the two questions are very much tangled up in each other.

These two questions were the initial driving force for the research and writing that Why Q Needs U required, although themes also emerged along the way. Ideas of identity, change, innovation and conservatism kept cropping up in the writing process. In order to do these themes justice and tie up all the threads successfully, I actually paused all writing for a month before attempting the book’s epilogue. The task was daunting, but what eventually emerged is, I think, my finest bit of writing to date.

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So, that’s my introduction to Why Q Needs U, due for release in October 2025! Please forgive this personal newsflash (yet another one) – it just feels so good to write about this at last.

I hope to write a proper new post for this website soon. With work, book and podcast duties, the best my brain has offered me recently is some half-baked grand-seeming ideas about Old Church Slavonic and a historical crisis in Christendom. Unlike all that, this post was at least coherent, and brief.

END.