Mongrel Hanako Footman is a quiet triumph – a lyrical, deeply intimate debut that explores womanhood, identity, and inheritance with rare grace. Already known for her work as an actor, Footman brings that same emotional nuance to the page, weaving three parallel stories set in London, Surrey, and Tokyo.
What makes Mongrel Hanako Footman’s debut stand out is its gentle way of holding complexity. It touches on grief, desire, belonging, and silence – never forcing meaning, just letting it unfold. The invisible threads between characters slowly reveal themselves, creating something both delicate and quietly powerful.
Footman’s prose is confident, poetic, and full of feeling. Mongrel isn’t a book to race through – it’s one to sit with, absorb, and carry with you. A beautiful beginning from a bold new voice in fiction.
📖 Overview
Mongrel – Hanako Footman
Mei loses her Japanese mother at age six. Growing up in suburban Surrey, she yearns to fit in, suppressing not only her heritage but her growing desire for her best friend Fran.
Yuki leaves the Japanese countryside to pursue her dream of becoming a concert violinist in London. Far from home and in an unfamiliar city, she finds herself caught up in the charms of her older teacher.
Haruka attempts to navigate Tokyo’s nightlife and all of its many vices, working as a hostess in the city’s sex district. She grieves a mother who hid so many secrets from her, until finally one of those secrets comes to light . . .
Shifting between three intertwining narratives, Mongrel reveals a tangled web of desire, isolation, belonging and ultimately, hope.
🧠 Themes and Inspiration
Mongrel is a powerful meditation on womanhood, identity, and intergenerational trauma. At its core, it explores the complexities of being mixed-race, the weight of cultural disconnection, and the often-unspoken resilience of women navigating silence, shame, and survival. Inspired by Footman’s own Japanese-British heritage, the novel draws on folklore, memory, and raw lived experience to craft a deeply emotional and poetic reflection on what it means to belong – to a family, a country, or even oneself.
What’s it About?
Three women – Mei, Yuki, and Haruka – live across different times and places: a schoolgirl in Surrey, a violinist in London, and a grieving daughter in Tokyo. On the surface, their lives are separate. But as their stories unfold, hidden threads begin to reveal a shared legacy of trauma, longing, and quiet strength. As they move through pain and dislocation, they are drawn toward a revelation that will change how they see themselves – and each other – forever.
Why It’s More Than Just the Blurb
What begins as three distinct coming-of-age narratives becomes something much more intricate and moving. Mongrel isn’t just about identity – it embodies it, structurally and thematically. Footman writes not only about the experience of being between cultures and languages, but also about how trauma can be passed down, how silence can speak louder than words, and how womanhood can be both a source of vulnerability and defiant power. The blurb hints at connection, but the novel delivers it in a way that is subtle, surprising, and deeply satisfying.
🔍 Deep Dive
Footman masterfully plays with narrative form, shifting perspectives and temporal boundaries to create a rich tapestry of feminine experience. Each character’s story feels emotionally complete in itself, yet gains new meaning when viewed alongside the others. The interstitial scenes – dreamlike, folkloric, often symbolic – blur the line between myth and memory, adding depth to the novel’s themes of inheritance, both genetic and cultural. And through it all runs a quietly radical idea: that fractured identity doesn’t make a person weaker – it can be a source of strength.
What’s Inside? (Spoiler-Free Breakdown)
- A triptych structure: three women’s stories, each rendered in vivid, intimate prose
- Themes of motherhood, grief, sexual agency, and racial identity
- Atmospheric settings ranging from suburban England to vibrant, lonely Tokyo
- Subtle intersections between the narratives that build to a poignant whole
- A delicate blend of realism and myth, creating a hauntingly poetic tone
- A celebration of feminine resilience and emotional truth
Full Review By Jasmine
★ ★ ★ ★
Hanako Footman’s Mongrel is a breathtaking debut that weaves together three seemingly disparate narratives into a single, luminous portrait of womanhood, identity, and survival. With lyrical prose and astonishing emotional clarity, Footman invites us into the lives of Mei, Yuki, and Haruka – three young women connected not by time or place at first, but by a shared inheritance of grief, desire, alienation, and resilience.
What’s most striking is how beautifully these individual stories converge. At first, the novel feels like three novellas braided together, each exploring a different kind of estrangement: Mei, biracial and motherless, navigating her adolescence in a predominantly white Surrey; Yuki, a gifted violinist from rural Japan, drifting into an unsettling relationship with her older teacher in London; and Haruka, adrift in Tokyo’s nightlife, numbing the pain of her mother’s death while slowly unravelling her past. Each woman is deeply lonely, but not broken – they are searching, resisting, reaching out in their own ways.
As the novel progresses, subtle echoes begin to emerge: memories, symbols, emotional chords that reverberate across chapters. When the stories begin to gently intersect, it’s not in a grand twist but a quiet, devastating reveal that reorients the whole narrative. It’s so satisfying and emotionally rich to witness these threads tighten – not just narratively, but thematically. The moment of realisation is like a light coming on in a dark room: everything that seemed isolated suddenly belongs.
One of the most powerful aspects of Mongrel is its fierce exploration of womanhood in its many forms: as a source of pain, of beauty, of power. Each of the women confronts exploitation and erasure in different ways – whether it’s through sexual violence, racism, or familial abandonment -and yet none of them is rendered as a victim. Footman writes with a deep empathy that refuses to simplify or pity. Instead, she centres their interior lives, giving them space to be flawed, angry, desirous, ashamed, and hopeful.
The novel also touches on themes of cultural identity and heritage with immense care. Mei’s mixed-race experience – always being asked “where are you really from” – echoes the title Mongrel itself: a word that has long been used to degrade, but here is reclaimed as a symbol of complex belonging. Footman doesn’t shy away from showing the emotional weight of disconnection from language, tradition, and homeland. But neither does she present identity as something fixed or easily claimed – it’s fluid, painful, and deeply personal.
The prose throughout is exquisite – sometimes spare and quiet, sometimes brimming with sensory detail. Footman’s background as an actor perhaps informs the novel’s emotional immediacy; every moment feels inhabited, especially in scenes of bodily vulnerability or intimacy. Her descriptions of food, music, and the Tokyo streets in particular are incredibly vivid. Even the interludes, which feel drawn from Japanese folklore or dream logic, deepen the novel’s meditations on storytelling and inherited memory.
Mongrel is not always easy reading – it grapples with trauma, isolation, and sexual exploitation with clear-eyed honesty – but it is never gratuitous. Instead, it offers a nuanced portrait of survival, of women who endure and remake themselves in the aftermath of what they’ve been through. It is about the ache of missing mothers and the bonds between women that, once forged, do not easily fray.
This is a stunning, powerful debut – emotionally intelligent, structurally elegant, and profoundly moving. Footman doesn’t just write about connection – she creates it, page by page. Mongrel is a reminder that our stories, no matter how fragmented or painful, can ultimately belong to something larger. Something whole.
🎯 For the Right Reader
If you’re drawn to literary fiction that doesn’t just tell a story but slowly reveals one – layer by layer, emotion by emotion – Mongrel is a must-read. It’s perfect for fans of authors like Yoko Ogawa, Bernardine Evaristo, or Ocean Vuong, who appreciate narrative experimentation, poetic language, and deep emotional truths. This is a novel for readers who crave stories about the unseen threads that bind women across time and space, and who find beauty in complexity, silence, and transformation. For more literary fiction, check out the rest of our catalogue here >>
Where I Found It
I wasn’t really looking for a new book when I found Mongrel – or maybe it found me. I spotted it on a display table, the cover catching my eye first: soft, quiet, a little haunting.
💡 FAQs
Here are a few things readers often wonder about Mongrel and Hanako Footman:
What is Mongrel about?
Hanako Footman’s debut novel Mongrel intertwines the stories of three young women – Mei, Yuki, and Haruka – spanning Surrey, London, and Tokyo.
Haruka, working as a hostess in Tokyo’s nightlife, is grappling with grief and buried family secrets.
The novel shifts among their stories and gradually reveals how their lives are connected through themes of desire, isolation, identity, and resilience
Mei loses her Japanese mother at a young age and grows up in suburban Surrey, yearning to fit in while suppressing her heritage and her deep feelings for her best friend.
Yuki, from rural Japan, moves to London to study violin, where she becomes entangled in a troubling relationship with her teacher.
Who did Hanako Footman play in The Crown?
Hanako Footman appeared in The Crown (Netflix), portraying a character named Lily in the season 2 episode “A Company of Men”.
👋 Final Thoughts
Mongrel is delicate yet devastating, lyrical yet grounded. It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t just tell a story – it reveals one, piece by piece, until you’re left holding something quietly profound. Hanako Footman’s writing is thoughtful and poetic, and her portrayal of womanhood – its strength, its softness, its rage, its tenderness – feels deeply honest. The way the three narratives converge is both subtle and powerful, creating an emotional payoff that’s as satisfying as it is haunting. If you’re looking for something that will move you, challenge you, and stay with you long after you close the cover, Mongrel is it.