Toby Godden's debut novel UniKin is a magical realist detective story set in Hackney. But as he explains, it is also part of a wider imaginative project spanning social networks, time travel, and the question of how people might choose to live differently together.
It is five in the morning in Abercrave, a village in the Upper Swansea Valley, and Toby Godden has not slept. He has just finished a live YouTube launch stream for something called The Time Travellers Guild, simultaneously posting dispatches to a new social network he built himself, while his debut novel sits freshly published on the other side of a fortnight he describes, with characteristic understatement, as significant. There is a dog somewhere. The valley is dark.
UniKin — a contraction of United Kingdom — was published on 1 March by Desk Publishing. It is a procedural magical realist detective mystery set in Hackney, east London, where Godden lived for thirteen years before returning to Wales. Its central image is so simple it feels inevitable: the unicorn on the British passport is chained. The book asks why. And what happens when you release the chain.
"Symbols are used to bind us in a collective spell. The unicorn, released, is luck and innocence unchained. That is a very powerful thing."
Toby Godden
"I consider myself a citizen of the United Kingdom," Godden says carefully, "rather than British. That word carries connotations of subjecthood I find distastefully disempowering." The distinction matters to him, and it runs beneath UniKin like a ley line, never surfacing as argument but doing its work through story.
The detective is Clay, a Windrush Jamaican. His companion is Finch, a Romanian delivery cyclist. Together they search for Tangent Jones, a Lucksmith — a locksmith of the craft who deals with luck as a material. Jones is one of the Seven Sisters, groundedly magical women who hold the city together through invisible work, their labour unacknowledged by the metropolis that depends on it. "A Windrush Jamaican and a Romanian migrant," I observe. "Two people the British state has at various points tried to erase." Godden nods. "The argument is implicit."
The Seven Sisters are rooted in geography that doubles back on itself in ways that feel less like research and more like revelation. Seven Sisters is a village in Neath Valley, opposite Abercrave, and the birthplace of St Patrick — the patron saint of a third nation entirely. It is also a neighbourhood in north London. "Hackney ley lines, all the way down," Godden says. The novel is built on real places whose names are doing secret work, and the same logic applies to its title: UniKin, hidden in plain sight on every passport, a spell we carry in our pockets.
The narrative gestated for seven years before arriving in a fortnight of concentrated writing. "Did it feel like remembering rather than inventing?" I ask. A pause. "A little."
"There is no us and them. The chain isn't imposed from outside — it's the accumulated weight of every time we chose to be subjects rather than citizens."
Toby GoddenUniKin is the first published artefact in something Godden has been constructing, quietly and in parallel, for years. Faetime — a social network he built himself, launched this month, capped at one hundred members, invite only — is another piece. So is Zoneout, a collaborative listening room that accumulated 43 users and 731 played tracks within weeks of launch. So is The Time Travellers Guild, whose live launch I have apparently interrupted.
He had originally registered the domain Faebook.eu, he tells me. He was legally prevented from keeping it. The name of the thing he was building in opposition to asserting itself the moment he tried to name the alternative.
"We stand in opposition to the algorithm of control," he says. The cap of one hundred members is not a technical limitation but a choice, designed around Dunbar's number, with forty offline relationships factored in as part of the human rather than subtracted from it. "Once you're in a network with too many people, it becomes impossible to know them all." The restraint is the point.
The Time Travellers Guild, he explains, is the metafictional collective underlying all of it: free participants operating with consent to co-create reality. "Consent is the whole of the law." The transparency is deliberate. "The magic only works ethically when everyone knows they're in the room and has chosen to be there."
The time travel, he is at pains to clarify, is literal. "Humans have the ability to look at the future and select a timeline that aligns with the best version of themselves they can be. This is the methodology for practical human time travel. No teleportation necessary." UniKin, he says, is set in a possible future — post-unicorn release — and reaching it in reality will require a core of people working creatively together toward what he calls alignment with the higher self in the fifth dimension. World peace, in short, achieved through narrative.
The fiction is the destination. Faetime is where the core gathers. The archive of what gets posted there becomes, over time, something you can read back — a record of how a small group of people thought and talked and felt at the precise moment they decided to try.
Is the chain on the unicorn, I ask finally, something imposed from outside? He shakes his head. "We do it to ourselves. It's the accumulated weight of every time we consented to be subjects rather than citizens. Every time we fed the algorithm. Every time we chose the comfortable story over the true one."
And the unicorn, released, is what exactly? "It's a free thing. A principle. Luck and innocence unchained is a powerful thing."
The how of it — the long story of the chain itself — he declines to give me. "Read the book," he says.
UniKin by Toby Godden is published by Desk Publishing.
UniKin is available to order directly.