Lucy Apps’s Gloria Don’t Speak is a profound and important debut

Portrait by Suki Dhanda for The Observer

At the beginning of Lucy Apps’s tender and surprising debut novel, Gloria is 19 and doesn’t have much to do. It’s 1999. She’s just finished college so spends her days wandering the streets and perching on park benches close to her home in Newham, east London.

It’s on a bench that she meets Jack, who starts telling Gloria about how much the area is changing. After meeting him in the same spot a few times, she walks to the park with him, and then spends afternoons with him back at his flat, listening to him describe how he’s preparing for the end of the world in the run-up to the millennium.

Jack does almost all the talking. Gloria has learning disabilities and selective mutism. When she does communicate, she tends to do so with nods and one-word answers. But she is an attentive listener, with a rich imagination and a singular way of seeing the world.

“Jack’s eyes,” she thinks, “are so blue, it’s a strange colour in a human face. Some people’s eyes are blue like stone or blue like water. But Jack’s eyes are blue like plastic. They look like they are made of tinted plastic stuck on over the white.”

Apps is a GP who grew up and still lives in Newham, and volunteers with women with learning disabilities. In January, she was selected as one of The Observer’s best debut novelists of 2026, and yesterday Gloria Don’t Speak was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction.

The close third-person narration is a marvel. Apps uses straightforward vocabulary – words that Gloria understands – but this doesn’t mean the narrative is simplistic or patronising.

Her descriptions of Gloria’s internal anguish are sensitively wrought and vivid: “She pulls the night in and out because there is no other way to breathe”; “The air is not real air, it’s made of something that won’t move, won’t be sucked in and out.”

And the phonetic repetitions of parts of dialogue – such as “anna salt anna salt” after a police officer mentions “an assault” – give us a glimpse into how our protagonist, disoriented in a loud, busy world, does not always immediately process what she hears as carrying meaning.

In Jack, Gloria finds a home. Realising her mother wouldn’t approve of her spending so much time with him, she makes sure she’s back home before her mum arrives from work. Gloria begins to develop an obsession, a need to be around Jack. He is, we come to understand, one of the very few people who ever seems to want to be around her.

But while he can be generous – buying her hot chips and offering her endless cans of ice-cold Coke – Jack is also capable of cruelty and rage. He touches Gloria’s neck without her consent, a stroke that becomes a squeeze, insisting she “stay still… show me you trust me”.

It becomes clear that their relationship is abusive. Gloria knows it’s not right – “Stop,” she says, bravely – but still she returns to him. Jack’s behaviour worsens, leading to a violent incident that separates the pair and bestows upon Gloria a long-lasting trauma.

The novel follows her for the next 20 years, as she moves into a home for adults with learning needs and develops new obsessions, all the while remaining hooked on the memory of Jack.

One significant scene towards the book’s end – in which Gloria finds the language to speak up for herself, only to be convinced to stay silent by those who wish to protect her – is just one of its many poignant moments. Gloria Don’t Speak is an emotionally profound and politically important novel that insists the reader look through the eyes of a person who is too rarely seen.

Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps is published by Weatherglass Books (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply