Big Nobody

by Alex Kadis

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Black Humor; Literary Fiction; Humorous Fiction

Synopsis

A wickedly funny coming-of-age novel about a misfit teenager in London determined to eliminate the one thing standing between her and a good life: her father

“Hands down the funniest, most original novel I’ve read in ages.”—Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding

I think it’s safe to say that my father was probably always an abomination of nature.

It’s 1974 in London and Connie Costa’s already pitiful life has gone off the rails. She’s spiraling from the loss of her mother and younger brothers in a tragic accident. And the man responsible is her Dad—otherwise known as “The Fat Murderer.”

Kept at home under his increasingly tyrannical rule, Connie is an outcast who spends her nights conversing with the David Bowie poster on her wall and raiding her stash of whiskey and chocolate. Her only social outlet is the weekly gatherings with her father and their immigrant community of Greek “Freaks.” There she finds her life’s one bright spot: sneaking off with her friend Vas to smoke cigarettes, debate literature, and joke about whether it is finally time to run away together. But when Connie sees an opportunity to get out from under her father’s thumb for good, she must make a perilous decision that will change her forever.

Devastatingly tender and riotously funny, Alex Kadis’ Big Nobody tells a warmhearted story about the rocky path to finding ourselves and the people who keep us afloat.

Release date: March 10, 2026

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

I slammed my bedroom door. Hard.

Two reasons:

1) To interrupt the TV viewing of The Fat Murderer downstairs.

2) To see if I could break some windows, thereby further interrupting the TV viewing of The Fat Murderer downstairs.

My friend Soraya had told me, this very lunchtime, that if you slammed a door hard enough, it would break all the windows in the house. I had believed her. Soraya had also said that if you screamed at the right pitch, loudly enough, you could make a lightbulb burst. I tried that now a few times, with increasing volume. No joy there either. I experimented with a frenzied combination of the two—scream slam, slam scream. And got absolutely nothing.

On the bus on the way home from school that afternoon, I had started reading Carrie by Stephen King and now thought how brilliant it would be if, like his title character, I could just exact supernatural levels of destruction using the telekinetic power of my mind. I focused on the door with a laser-like intensity to see if I could slam it with my brain waves, but it just made me feel dizzy. I’d have to practice.

“I don’t know why I listen to bloody Soraya,” I mumbled resentfully, while kicking my vile school shoes off and booting them under the bed. At school, Soraya had styled herself as a soothsayer for the preteen masses. She had once told a rapt morning-break audience that if one were to swallow a tapeworm, it would digest all of your calories and you could eat as much as you wanted and never get fat. When I asked her where I could obtain such a creature, she told me I’d have to either lick a cat’s bum or snog Calvin Belding from Norrington Boys’ School down the road, because rumor was he had a tapeworm and would happily pass it on for a tongue sandwich and a go on your tits. I said I’d rather go for the cat’s bum hole than Calvin Belding’s revolting face hole: I’d seen it, and even from a distance I could tell it was no oil painting. Anyway, when I happened to mention this to my music teacher, Mizz Liddle, during lunchtime guitar practice, she said it was best to ignore someone as musically bereft as Soraya and, if I wanted to lose weight, to just stop eating so many sweets. When I conveyed this to Soraya, she had countered that Mizz Liddle was most likely a hermaphrodite and, therefore, not to be trusted on issues pertaining to persons who had made a firm decision on their genitals.

With a renewed sense of fury fueled by chagrin and hormones, I, Constance Costa, The Half Greek Imprisoned Daughter of The Fat Murderer, gave it one last shot: a simultaneous scream and slam. Much better. And I had succeeded in disturbing the television viewing of The Fat Murderer downstairs.

“Pack it in! I’m going to come up there in a minute and give you a bloody wallop,” The Fat Murderer bellowed from below. That’s what he meant to say. How it came out was: “Pack that one ap. Am go to cam ap there and gif you a blatty wallaps.”

Despite working in London for sixteen years, and marrying a perfect English Rose, The Fat Murderer, AKA my dad, had neither shed his Greek Cypriot accent nor learned the finer points of the English language. Among his many rhetoric transgressions, he randomly put an S on the end of words where they weren’t warranted. He had friends who lived in Totten-hams and Hack-neys. A holiday was a holi-days. A coat was a coats. It didn’t matter how many times I said “There’s only one Walthamstow,” as my dad would always nod assuredly and say, “Yes, the Waltham-stows,” as if it was I who was the moron. It made my sphincter clench just to think that I shared DNA with him.

The wallop was probably an empty threat anyway; since it had become just the two of us this past year, the walloping had subsided somewhat. Which was weird, because I’d have thought that, with less people to wallop, the full wallop consignment would have landed on me. Still, I’d have taken the wallop over the pidgin English any day. It really got on my nerves.

My dad, AKA The Fat Murderer, was an East End tailor by trade, and an idiot by all other counts. He ran his workshop out of a premises on our local high street. If asked, he told people he was “Tailor to the stars . . .” He wasn’t. He made suits for Leyton Orient football players and waistcoats for the waiters from The Corinthian Barbecue and Grill Greek Cypriot restaurant in Loughton.

I had tried to kill him once. My dad. It involved leaving a roller skate at the top of the stairs. I’d seen it in a Beano comic. He should have stepped on it, flown down the stairs, legs cycling comically in mid-air, and broken his neck. Instead, he just kicked the skate to one side and shouted, “Somebotty pick ap this blatty shits.” I vowed to try harder next time.

My present anger wasn’t quite spent, so I glanced around my bedroom, looking for something to destroy, and snatched a cup from my desk; but I didn’t really want to break any of my stuff. Everything was special: my desk, my books, my albums, my record player, my single bed, my music mags, my stockpile of sweets and booze, my delicious ciggies, and my guitar, which would undoubtedly take me on the road to rock superstardom and boundless freedom. And, most precious of all, my wall-to-wall posters: my gang, the guardians of my citadel, my closest confidants, whom I had created and who resided securely in the cavernous, hungry space between my dreams and my reality. They were my world.

I liked it in here. The outside world wasn’t meant for people like me. I was destined not to be a part of it but to grip on to the edge with a rictus grin and white knuckles. In here I lived deep in the bosom of what I had built. In here I could survive.

“Put the cup down, Constance, silly billy . . .” They were coming alive now, the gang, stepping out of their flat paper existence, making their presence known, dusting off their charms, fanning up their vanities, vying for my attention. I could see a flicker of a feather boa being rearranged, the straightening of a white bejeweled jumpsuit, the egotistical smoothing down of over-coiffed hair. I heard the incidental twang of an electric guitar, as if it were being set aside in anticipation of a powwow.

“Hey, Constance, babe, got time for a conflab?” It was Marc speaking. Marc Bolan. The love of my life. Now he had arrived, they’d all be coming—The Osmonds, The Jacksons, The Cassidy Brothers. I could sense the electricity in the room, the crackling air.

I grabbed the chair from in front of my desk and propped it against the door handle, like I’d seen them do on telly, to secure it, just in case The Fat Murderer did get off his fast arse and come upstairs. I knew he wouldn’t. My dad never ventured into my room these days, except in the mornings, as he had habitually done since I was a little kid, and always when I was getting dressed. I’d never hear him coming and instantly be caught unaware when he’d fling the door open and stand there staring like a maniac, asking me what I was doing, as if it wasn’t obvious.

I removed the chair from under the door knob, opened the door, and kicked it shut one last time. With feeling.