A fresh and stylish debut following a family of women who are thrust into the spotlight in the wake of a scandal and expertly exploit their newfound fame–perfect for readers of Good Material and Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Lowe Job by Grace Alexander, which releases on June 16th 2026.
When Lili Lowe gets caught having an affair with her married boss, an admired politician, she finds herself at the epicenter of a scandal that could dismantle her life as she knows it. She turns, as many daughters would, to her mother. Yet Lydia Lowe is a former talent agent, and it’s not long before the whole world knows the name Lili Lowe.
As the spotlight brightens on Lili and her three younger sisters Stevie, Iris, and Katie, the Lowe women’s lives are changed in ways they could never have predicted. It’s soon clear that fame and fortune, comes with a price—and sometimes, the louder one’s voice (especially a woman’s), the more others will seek to silence it.
With a potent blend of spectacular style, compulsive voice, sharp social commentary, and ferocious heart, The Lowe Job is escapism with teeth: a contemporary book club novel for the modern reader looking for fresh fiction that is at once funny, sexy, incisive, and heartfelt.
Chapter 1
It started with a blow job.
They had aspirations for it to become the most notorious blow job of all time. It was a lofty aim. They knew that realistically they were never going to beat that blow job—you know the one—but the least they could do was try.
Theirs involved a politician too. A young, charismatic, liberal politician. That’s what the press would home in on when they reported on it. Liberal. Said as though the word were synonymous with sex worker.
As liberal with his politics as he is with his sex life.
Never mind left wing, what’s he doing with his left hand in that photograph?
Is this what woke looks like?
Teddy Landen caught with his pants down—and not because of his policies this time.
Landen blows it with his assistant.
There’s no denying sexual relations between Landen and that woman.
But who is that woman?
Who is that woman?
Who is she?
“My name is Lili Lowe.”
It was her first time in a television studio. Simon Steen was an up-and-coming, soon-to-be-infamous broadcast journalist. He had found his moderate fortune working as a talent agent but had become bored with celebrities who were too tight to pay for an assistant, making inordinate demands at unconscionable hours. He didn’t spend six years making coffees at the largest agency in London to book trains for a list of semifamous soap actors. He wanted to be the one making the demands, doing the grilling. He carried that chip on his shoulder every time someone sat on the chair in front of him under those studio lights. He was an attack dog. He was exactly what Lydia Lowe had wanted for her daughter’s first interview.
“And who are you, Lili Lowe?”
“That’s a bit existential,” she smiled coyly. Lydia, standing beside the studio camera, nodded her head approvingly.
“You don’t need to come out of this being liked, darling. Not yet,” Lydia had told Lili in the car on the way to the studio. “You put their favorite politician’s cock in your mouth, so no one’s going to like you too much at the moment, sweetheart. But you do need to come out of this being known. If people think you’re innocent, caught up in a politician’s ego, then they’ll coo over you for a minute and move on. If you leave a sour taste in their mouths, then they’ll spend weeks trying to spit you out. You’re buying us time, so that we can take control of this situation. You don’t want to go down in history as his mistake, darling. You want him to go down as yours.”
“OK, Mum,” Lili said, picking at a piece of hard skin at the side of her thumbnail.
“It’s a balance though, sweetheart. They need to dislike you but not despise you. They need to be intrigued by you. You need to be redeemable.”
“That’s very specific. How am I meant to do that?”
“You’ve been doing it all your life, darling.”
“How do people know you?” Steen probed.
“I was Teddy Landen’s assistant.”
“Teddy Landen the MP?”
“Yes.”
Lili stifled a smile. It was enough to entice Steen. “Have you been in a car with Landen recently?”
“Yes,” Lili replied. She took a deep inhale through her nose.
“When?”
“Sixteenth of September.”
“And what were you doing in the car?”
“We were working.”
“Is that all you were doing?”
“Well.” She exhaled this time. Loudly, pensively. “No.”
“Is this you?”
Steen held up an image in front of his face, tilted more toward the audience than Lili. The same image flashed up on screens around the studio and on televisions around the country. A flashbulb illuminating the backseat of a Mercedes car. Lili is on her knees in the footwell, leaning over Landen’s lap. His trousers are down. His hairy legs are strikingly pale in the light of the reporter’s preflash. His hand is halfway to his face in a pathetic attempt to hide his identity. Lili has her hair pulled up in a high bun, her side profile showing. Some will say she’s smiling in the image. She knew what she was doing, they’ll comment. What can I say? I was enjoying it, she’ll tell those who ask.
Steen handed her the photograph. She nodded solemnly.
“It is.”
“Did you know that he was married? Is married?”
“I did.”
“Are you a homewrecker, Miss Lowe?”
“Unintentionally, Simon. Yes, I am.”
“Was it unintentional though? Really?”
“Well, I mean, I didn’t fall onto his penis, if that’s what you mean.”
Some of the audience gasped, others laughed.
“So you knew what you were doing?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“You suppose so?”
“I knew what I was doing in that moment, but I didn’t appreciate the gravity of my actions and what the after-effects would be.”
“The gravity being . . .?”
“His wife, his career. My career.”
“You’re worried about your career in all of this?”
“Of course I am. Wouldn’t you be?”
“I wouldn’t be caught doing that in the back of a car with my married boss!” Drops of spit from Steen’s mouth smacked Lili’s face.
“You wouldn’t be caught,” she said. “That’s the only difference, Simon.”
It was the performance of a lifetime. Perhaps it was beginner’s luck, or perhaps it was something very different—a distinct lack of reflection, because it was the moment before the whole world began to hold a mirror up to her life.
The furor around the Steen interview was instantaneous. Everyone had seen the images. They all had an opinion on the Teddy Landen debacle. But until that point, Lili had been an appendage. Following the Steen interview, Lili was the beating heart of the scandal.
Lydia’s plan was simple—start with Steen and focus one hundred percent of the interview on the scandal. Answer all his questions. Give the audience what they wanted. Other journalists would want a piece of the action—hyenas on the carcass. Lili was to let them feast, and then she would rise from the ashes. Eventually, she would be invited to speak just as Lili Lowe, not as Lili Lowe who sucked the dick of a politician in the back of a parked Mercedes.
Lili was witty, charming, candid. She was every talk show host’s dream. At first, the audiences loved to hate her, but soon they loved to love her. The hosts loved her too. Her exposure exploded. Like a volcano, you couldn’t walk the crater without feeling her heat.
Her next venture was lined up ready—a reality show, following Lili in the days after the scandal, showing her harassed by the paparazzi, bullied on the internet, shamed as she walked down the street. They were already filming when she went on Steen. Lydia had hired someone she knew from her days working on a soap opera. She would sell the footage to the producers of their reality show for half a million pounds. The family’s fee for participating in the series would be negotiated on top of that. No one would wonder why they were filming Lili during those early days. They would just consume it, like pigs at a trough.
Excerpted from the book THE LOWE JOB, provided courtesy of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2026 by Grace Alexander. Reprinted by permission.
