Lucy Apps’s debut novel Gloria Don’t Speak, published this week, is attracting significant attention from critics, and last month saw Apps named as one of the best debut writers of 2026 by The Observer. Good things seem to lie ahead for this young practising GP from east London.

Set in Apps’s home borough of Newham, Gloria Don’t Speak is about a young, bright, working-class woman with learning difficulties and a form of mutism. The book reads as a tender experiment in writerly empathy, with Apps – a voluntary support worker with people with learning difficulties – taking Gloria’s point of view, and using observation and innovative literary techniques in imagining her responses. Gloria faces sometimes horrific ordeals, and for a first novel it shows a terrific sense of control over what could have been highly challenging material. The book also contains powerfully evocative descriptions of Newham, an area of the capital that receives little positive attention from journalists and artists; it is a refreshing change from familiar, stereotypical images of other more gentrified areas of east London. The Bee caught up with Apps to discuss this superb piece of contemporary working-class fiction, as well as class and health, the changing politics of east London, and the genius of Martina Cole.

Richard Benson: Lucy, Gloria Don’t Speak is being hailed as a feat of imaginative empathy. You’re a GP, and separately you work with people with learning difficulties. Is the novel based on your own experience in those situations?

Lucy Apps: To a point. Working with people with learning disabilities is always about building relationships with people, and trying to think, well, what’s going on for you? Why are you saying this? Why are you doing this? Where might that be coming from? You try to respond in a way that matches your guess, and then if you get it wrong, rethink or try to just say that, well, why did I get that wrong?

Similarly, writing the novel, I was thinking about meeting people, and entering into their world and their perspective.

RB: Because of the fashion for polemic, I was half-expecting it to be more political. But that didn’t seem to be what you were trying to do here.

LA: No, I certainly wasn’t trying to write this book to be like, “This is what’s going on. This is how we need to reform things.” This is my guess at what might be going on in the head of a fictional character.

RB: How did you begin working with people with learning disabilities?

LA: When I was in medical school, I worked with special needs kids in my time off. It was through my mum, who worked at a support organisation for kids with disabilities. I really loved it. I qualified as a doctor in 2022, and when I started working I really missed that support work, so I started volunteering with adult women with learning difficulties. I’ve carried on ever since.

RB: What was so rewarding about it?

LA: You can build really strong relationships with non-verbal children and adults – I think that wasn’t something that I was necessarily expecting. I also wasn’t really expecting it to be as fun as it was.

RB: With lines like “She’s not confused. She knows what she did. She pushes a man, she runs away.” You take the reader inside Gloria’s thought processes, and we have a sense that as a support worker, you must have a lot of experience of guessing or intuiting how people think?

LA: Yes… When I first started working with kids who were non-verbal and autistic, I would just watch a child playing. Say they were just tapping something, I would stand next to them and tap it as well. They would start noticing me tapping it, and then maybe they would tap a different rhythm and I would tap a different rhythm, and we’d do things like that. Like okay, you’re tapping it – why are you tapping it? What do you like about tapping it? I’d just try to get involved in their world. Eventually they would start to notice me and then we would start to do stuff together rather than just doing it side by side. It’s just guessing, but it’s the same with anyone, isn’t it? You try to work out what’s motivating people, and why they’re saying things, and why they’re behaving the way they’re behaving.

RB: I guess you have to be careful not to project?

LA: Yes of course. It’s really easy for all of us to do that with everyone – to just assume that someone’s acting for one reason when actually it’s from something completely different that you’re never going to understand. For example if somebody’s stressed about going into a bathroom, say, you might think, oh, is it because of the hand dryer making a noise? But sometimes people just are stressed or upset or whatever for their own reasons.

RB: How did you start writing about the experience of someone with learning difficulties? And what was your path to publication?

LA: It came out of guessing and being curious. I’ve always written, and I started writing novels and enjoyed the process. Then I began Gloria Don’t Speak in 2017, and kept going with it because I enjoyed it. I wrote the vast majority in 2018, and for a while I was sending it out to agents and publishers, and not getting any interest. Eventually I came across Weatherglass, the publisher, and after reading some of the books on their list I thought, well, maybe this is something they’d like. I sent my book to them, and then they initially asked if I could make some changes. It was a bit of a mess structurally. They said that if they liked what I did, then they would think about offering publication.

RB: The story explores repercussions of an event in 1999, moving to 2001, 2017 and 2019. Were the structural changes you made connected to that?

LA: Initially it moved backwards and forwards in time, and the publisher said just give us a chronological account. There were other changes, but that was the structural change. It was very good advice. It freed me to be less gimmicky, and just tell a story.

RB: You show us how Gloria is hearing speech by phonetically repeating parts of dialogue – for example, when Jack says “He got it drawn out in chalk like or what.?” And she hears “Korwhat. Likorwhat.” It struck me as a clever way of taking us into her head.

LA: That probably came from talking to people and noticing that sometimes they will just repeat phrases or say phrases in a certain way, and you can tell that although they’ve understood the meaning of the phrase, they haven’t understood word by word what’s being said. It made me think about why people repeat those phrases.

RB: You capture a distinct east London environment in the novel, and it’s a world that isn’t found in much fiction. I enjoyed the simple, clear language and love of the area in lines like: “She can see Canary Wharf in the distance with other big glass towers next to it. She can see the supermarket and the flyover and all the new flats, brightly coloured and gleaming all the way up to the sky. When Jack lived there there was a factory over the other side of the station.”

LA: Well, I was born in Newham, I grew up in Newham, and yes, I love east London. The longest I’ve been away other than that is probably about three months. I work in Barking – I couldn’t work as a GP in Newham because I know too many people there. Most of my family and friends are here, and maybe if I’d grown up somewhere else I would love that place the same. One of the things that I really like about the area, though, is that you can mix with so many different people, and just do so many different things. It’s just there on your doorstep. There’s also lots of public transport, so everything’s very accessible.

RB: For Gloria it’s a challenging environment at times – do you think her experiences would have been different if she’d been somewhere else? Or from a more affluent background?

LA: I think it would probably depend more on the environment than on her background. The events of the novel are products of being in Newham and wandering around and being vulnerable. Even if she came from a more affluent background, if she was still going out in Newham she would still probably be in the same situations. If she was living in a nice little village somewhere where everyone’s got money and everyone knows each other, maybe her experiences would be different.

RB: Talking about the influence of geography makes me think of people in the 19th century studying the relationship between location and health, and that leading to the study of class.

LA: It’s interesting that they came to geography first because the impacts of location on health are obvious. We still talk about postcodes impacting on health – they’re part of the risk calculation when we’re calculating the risk of cardiovascular disease, for example. That may be partly to do with class but it can also be connected to pollutants. For example in Newham we’ve got really high levels of air pollution, with City Airport and the A13. It doesn’t really matter if you’re rich, if you’re living in this area, you’re still breathing the stuff in. Although obviously if you’re rich, you’ve still got better opportunities to take care of your health.

RB: Have you worked in any non-urban areas?

LA: I did GP in a rural area for a bit and the social problems there were shocking to me. When I went to the park there on my lunch break, people were openly shooting up, and I’d never seen anything like it. I mean, people do shoot up in Newham, but not so blatantly. I’d go on home visits and it was a bit like Happy Valley. It surprised me because I just assumed, you know, rural England – it’s going to be really lovely. What you find there is that there are very few resources to help. There are lots of charities and projects to support people in London. But if you’re living in poverty in rural England, it’s really tough. And it’s hard to just get a low-paid job, because if you’re in a village, how are you going to commute? You’ve got no money, and there’s no real public transport.

RB: Gloria’s nemesis character, Jack, does some terrible things and is often very unpleasant. I’m sure he’ll remind readers of people they know, with dialogue like “I pay my taxes. I just want equal treatment same as everyone else. Same as what I’d get if I was a fucking refugee or a fucking single mother. Fuck all of them.” But you show a lot of understanding for him as well. As you had him railing against refugees and immigrants, did you have the current wave of anti-immigrant protesters in mind?

LA: Yes, he’s saying all of that, but I think he’s just somebody that is angry and frustrated for a lot of different reasons and that’s a hook to hang it on. He’s got a lot of other stuff going on as well that he’s maybe not so aware of. You can see that maybe if he changed his behaviour things would go better for him, but there are also a lot of circumstances where he’s just screwed either way.

Newham is very multiracial and the vast majority of people in this area don’t talk like that. Even if they think it they’re not going to say it. But this is in the section set in 1999, and a lot of the white people who feel that way moved out between 1999 and now. I haven’t really heard people here saying or talking like that.

RB: Gloria’s mum says “He must of [sic] thought all his Christmases come at once when he met you.” The assumption being that Jack is a sexual predator. But you make it more nuanced than that.

LA: Jack was just meant to be a slightly loose cannon, someone with a quite difficult sort of energy that he’s carrying around by himself. He hasn’t really got a lot of friends. And he’s found in Gloria somebody who isn’t judging him. And who’s given him the time of day. He gets a lot of self-esteem from the fact that in the way that he would see it, he’s not taking advantage of her. He reacts quite badly whenever that’s challenged.

RB: Let’s talk about you and your books. Did you enjoy reading when you were a child?

LA: I loved reading. I could spend all day in bed reading when I was a kid. My mum had to make me get up sometimes.

I read a lot of Roald Dahl, and I loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I also read The Secret Garden and stuff like that, you know, A Little Princess, Narnia, those classic books. That was when I was about seven or eight. Then I started reading more YA books, and in my late teens I got more into politics. I liked American radical writers from the 1970s and 1980s. Andrea Dworkin, the Black Panthers, a lot of Frantz Fanon. There was a point when I didn’t really want to read fiction and I was reading mostly Sivanandan and people like that, but then I got back into reading fiction, and read really widely.

I used to love detective novels as well. I loved Agatha Christie. I loved Sherlock Holmes, and Dick Francis. I mostly got those murder mystery books from my dad. He would get them from the library, and then I would read them. From my mum, I was getting books like Enid Blyton, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden.

RB: At the Bee we often talk about children’s reading and whether they like or need books that reflect their own environments. It sounds like you started out reading more fantasy-based or escapist books, but then grew into things that linked more directly to your world?

LA: Yes, I think when you’re a child, you want people travelling through great glass elevators and stuff, don’t you? But I did definitely find that as I got older, I wanted something that’s about a world that I knew. I started reading Courttia Newland, Alex Wheatle, Zadie Smith… And I absolutely love Martina Cole. I started reading her books and I just thought they were brilliant. She was writing about an area that I knew and it also slightly made sense of things that I hadn’t fully understood. Like, when she explains how organised crime works, I was like, oh, okay, that’s why that happens, you know. I also really like her style of writing.

RB: Did you study English at school?

LA: Yes, my A-levels were English language, philosophy, chemistry and biology.

RB: Did you know then that you wanted to study medicine?

LA: Yeah. I was very young and very idealistic.

RB: And how was your experience of higher education?

LA: I hadn’t realised how many people went to private school! I thought it was a really uncommon thing to go to private school.

I thought that every year about a thousand kids went to private school and everyone else went to state school. And then I realised that actually, loads and loads of people went to private schools. It took me by surprise. If anything, I’d thought that we were posh.

RB: Were there any books that helped you in writing Gloria Don’t Speak?

LA: I don’t think there was anything that I would necessarily say helped me create it but I read The Sound and the Fury around the time I started writing it.

RB: I wondered about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time?

LA: I liked that book but it’s not about the same thing. That’s a bit different because that boy doesn’t have a learning disability. I don’t think his diagnosis is ever mentioned, but I would imagine he’s autistic.

RB: Were your mum and dad readers?

LA: Yes. They had different backgrounds. My dad’s from Chatham. He left school at 14, but he’s a very gifted artist, so he went to art college and started working as an illustrator. My family are religious, so he mostly illustrates religious books. My mum did English lit at Oxford University. They met at a Christian publishing house. He was an illustrator and she was an editor. I’m not massively interested in labelling myself in class terms, because whatever I say, it’s like… you know, if I say I’m middle class, people are like, oh, come on, you’re not middle class. But if I say I’m working class, people are like, you’re not working class. I don’t really fit in anywhere.

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