Just over 18 months ago, Jessica George went to bed a regular 26-year-old publishing assistant living in a flatshare in Wandsworth, and woke up the next day a millionaire.
“You have to remember: this is the story I didn’t think would go anywhere,” the British-Ghanaian first-time author tells me repeatedly as we meet to discuss her new book Maame (pronounced ‘ma-meh’), which is finally published in the UK tomorrow after long being tipped as the biggest debut novel of 2023 (it launched in the US last month and is already storming bestseller lists). After five failed book attempts over the course of her twenties, George says Maame — a fictional story of grief, identity and female friendships inspired by her experience of caring for her father, who had Parkinson’s disease — was the one she never expected to take off.
