Jack Heath 🖊️
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📣 Latest News

1 July 2026

🛳️ Choppy Water is available to preorder!

But the clock is ticking. Once the book is published, you can't preorder it anymore. You'll have to just buy it, like a chump.

"Did you preorder Jack Heath's new action-packed thriller, like a true fan?" your closest friend will ask you.

"I ordered it," you'll mumble.

"I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear you," your friend will press. "Did you say you preordered it, or ordered it?"

"Ordered it," you'll shamefacedly confess, then wither under their disgusted stare.

You could lie, of course. Once you've got a copy of Choppy Water, who's to say you didn't preorder it? You can stroll into your local bookshop on release day and find it amongst the new releases. Then you can swagger down the street holding it. "It's even better than I thought it would be when I preordered it back in July," you'll brag to passers by. It's the perfect crime.

But what if, while reading A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, you use a receipt as a bookmark? What if (like all who attempt to read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) you never finish? At some point, the book is moved from your bedside table to your bookshelf, the incriminating receipt still inside. 

Years pass.

In 2037, while your robot butler is serving 3D-printed sponge cake, the same friend (their hair now grey, but their eyes still warm and bright) asks if they may borrow A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

"Why, certainly," you say, turning to your bookshelf. "But I can only vouch for the first 803 pages."

Your friend spends months reading Proust. When they reach page 803, a receipt falls out and flutters to the carpet. The title catches your friend's eye—Choppy Water. The receipt is dated November 3, 2026. Release day. Not several months earlier, as you've claimed for over a decade. 

Furious, your friend decides to confront you in person. They summon a hovering rideshare and hurtle over the barren landscape to your habitat bubble, seething all the way.

You deny it, of course. You're not even nervous. You've lived this lie for so long that it feels true. Then your friend brandishes the receipt.

At first you're baffled. You haven't seen a paper receipt in years. But soon you realise what it is, what it proves. Your stomach drops. You desperately try to snatch it from your friend's quivering hand. They hold it just out of reach, shouting. In the struggle, your friend stumbles backwards and falls—

Over the edge of the balcony—

Then down, down, down—

Into your instant-compost machine.

There's a grinding sound. A blood-curdling shriek of agony.

After that, only silence.

Aghast, you peer over the edge. Nothing remains of your friend except nitrogen-rich soil, tinted pink.

Your heart is racing. Now what to do? The body is gone, yes, but your retinal implant recorded the whole thing. It will upload the video to Google Cloud in minutes. When your friend is reported missing, the police will run a biometric search on the feeds of all known associates. They'll see the argument. The fall. Not only that, they'll realise that you're a release day buyer, not the upstanding preorderer you've pretended to be for many years.

You'll be imprisoned. Forced to work in the AI farms, feeding the servers with your brainwaves and cooling them with your sweat.

Your only hope is to remove your retinal implant before it syncs with the cloud.

Your gaze falls upon a pair of barbecue tongs...

I'm sure you'll agree that this scenario is horrific, and needs to be prevented at all costs. Call your local bookshop to preorder Choppy Water today!

Online retailers: amazon | booktopia | fishpond | thenile | readings

(Note: If you're feeling a bit of déjà vu, you must be a true fan—a version of the story above was first published in my newsletter back in 2023. I liked it so much that I revised and expanded it. Hope you don't mind.)

📰 Other News

  • 🚄 Bullet Train comes out in September! It's a game book (the reader chooses what the hero does) for readers aged 10+, previously published as Countdown to Danger: Bullet Train Disaster.

  • 📚 I've just finished a terrific crime novel; Bad Neighbours by Joanna Jenkins. If you liked Kill Your Boss, you'd probably like Bad Neighbours, too. Now I'm about to dive into She Won't Leave by Rebecca Heath. I'm looking forward to it (though it's very annoying to share a last name with such a talented writer). What else should I be reading? Let me know.

  • 🎙️I'm bad on camera, and sometimes I'm even bad on microphone. I get self-conscious, I try to say too much too quickly, I forget what the question was, et cetera. But I did better than usual in two recent interviews, so if you'd like to know more about my creative process, check out The KidLit Pod and The Book Deal.

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Catch you later, fellow readers!

—Jack Heath 🖊️

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