THE COST OF LOVING 

The Cost of Loving explores our responsibilities to the planet, to posterity, and to ourselves as individuals.

Structurally inventive and formally audacious, The Cost of Loving is a  novel with a mystery at its heart and a shock of twists as different realities emerge. Through a combination of spiral and straight line - a journey by turns hilarious and tragic - the reader awakes to the truth behind the narrator Rupe Noble’s words. The Cost of Loving is also a London novel. While in many ways local and particular, it is steeped in the myriad emanations of London and other world cities. Among all this it is concerned not least with environmental crisis, men’s and women’s mental health, love and sex, and society’s ideas of failure and success. Its message is clear - and ambiguous. In the end, the reader must decide where their heart lies. 

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Listen to Chapter 1 here:

Audio-visual recording of Chapter 1 (Coming Soon)



‘This is terrific! I finished reading it last week. Really, it’s very, very good. Deeply and increasingly disturbing (especially, I suspect, for a writer), but extremely well constructed and written with great agility and flair. So many lovely observations and asides . . . highly polished and carefully judged . . .’
—William Atkins

‘I love the premise and I love the gradual awareness that awakes in the reader of the gentle but insidious self-deception of the narrator . . . It reminded me a little bit of Leaving the Atocha Station.’
—Clare Conville


‘This is brilliantly written’
—Jenny Hewson

Martin’s short fiction has appeared in a range of publications including Esquire Magazine, New Writing (Picador), A Little Nest of Pedagogues – Selections of British Short Stories (British Council; published in the People’s Republic of China with dual English and Simplified Chinese texts), 3 AM, Tell Tales and The London Magazine. 

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Listen to ‘Forget-Me-Not’, from Esquire, here:

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Listen to ‘Under the Golden Arches’, from The London Magazine, here:

Martin has reviewed books for the Observer, the FT and the Sunday Times. His article ‘How writers benefit from creative writing courses’ features in the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook – available now in bookshops and online.

Martin has received numerous awards for his writing. At the University of East Anglia he won end of year prizes for outstanding achievement (UEA BA) and the Alumni Prize for Fiction (UEA MA). He has received writer’s awards on two occasions from Arts Council England. He has been a Hawthornden Fellow, and is a Wingate Scholar in literature.