Set in the aftermath of the UK’s catastrophic 1987 storm, Florence Knapp’s astonishingly brilliant debut novel, The Names, opens with Cora, a mother of two, walking through fallen trees and debris with her nine-year-old daughter Maia to register the birth of her son. Her husband, Gordon, a respected GP, expects the boy to be named after him. But Cora hesitates. Gordon is unpredictable, controlling and abusive. Naming the baby after him feels like sealing a fate. Will putting the name down in ink lock her son into a life shaped by his father’s legacy?
“Cora has never liked the name Gordon,” Knapp writes. “The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like someone slamming down a sports bag. Gordon. But what disturbs her more is that she must now pour the goodness of her son into its mould, hoping he’ll be strong enough to find his own shape within it.” The name, passed down through her husband’s family, feels inevitable but also unbearable.
What if choosing another name could set the child on a different path?
The novel then branches into three timelines. In one, the child is named Gordon. In another, he is named Bear — Maia’s suggestion, because “it sounds all soft and cuddly and kind”, but also “brave and strong”. Cora looks at the baby and imagines him being all of those things. She wants that for him. In the third, she names him Julian, drawn to its elegance and the meaning behind it: sky father.
The story follows each of these boys as they grow up. Each life is revisited in seven-year intervals, unfolding over 35 years. Through this structure, Knapp explores how small, personal choices shape the course of entire lives. The name becomes both a symbol and a starting point. It also raises the question of whether nominative determinism, the idea that names can influence a person’s character or destiny, might hold some truth. Is Gordon more likely to repeat his father’s patterns because he carries his name? Does Bear grow into his gentleness and strength because the word itself evokes them?
Each timeline shows how the boy, his sister and their mother evolve in response to that early decision. Gordon bears not just the name but the weight of his father’s personality. He grows up emotionally distant and closed off, shaped by control and the struggle to assert a separate identity.
In Bear’s timeline, the atmosphere is different. With his father Gordon absent, Cora is more present and more herself. Bear grows up in a home where emotion is allowed to surface. He is open, warm and more stable than his other selves.
Julian is more uncertain. Cora is hopeful but still recovering. Julian becomes cautious and reflective, attuned to his mother’s silences and anxieties. He carries the emotional weight of a fractured home life, unsure who he is allowed to be.
What impressed me most was the way the same key events appear in each storyline — birthdays, family ruptures, career choices — and how the characters respond differently depending on how loved, safe or seen they feel. That variation becomes the novel’s central concern. Knapp is less interested in dramatic turns than in emotional consequences. Maia is gay in all versions of the story, but whether she expresses this freely or hides it depends on the home environment. In Bear’s world, she is open and confident.
In all three possible outcomes, Gordon senior is a chilling figure. He is charming in public, but manipulative and emotionally abusive at home. Knapp worked with a domestic violence support worker to ensure the portrayal was accurate. “She told me that men like him don’t apologise. They don’t explain. They rewrite the story,” Knapp told The Irish Times. His power lies in performance, in controlling not just people but the narrative.
Despite this, The Names is not a bleak book. It is about survival, adaptation and, in some cases, repair. Gordon junior reaches a point where he begins to recognise the damage and tries, in his own small way, to act differently. “Maybe I don’t have to be what he was,” he says to a friend.
Knapp, who is also a quilter, has said she approached each timeline like a stitched pattern, with motifs and moments recurring in new combinations. Characters, images, colours and themes echo across lives. A particular melody, a garden path, a sentence repeated years apart — all are part of the emotional stitching.
One of the novel’s most affecting scenes comes near the end of the Bear timeline. Cora watches her adult children laugh together and realises that they are their own story now. Whatever she gave them, they’ve turned it into something else. That, to me, is the revelation at the heart of the novel. We may begin with our parents’ past, but how we carry that forward, and what we make of it, is up to us.
The Names has been widely praised for its ambitious structure. It’s a novel that invites close attention. Its scope is domestic, but its implications are wide-ranging. Who do we become whenno-one is watching? What are we carrying that we never chose? And can one small act help loosen the grip of the past?
