What began as a short story written during Grace Murray’s first year at the University of Edinburgh transformed, four years later, into her debut novel—Blank Canvas, published this January by Penguin FigTree. Through the magic of The Student’s mysterious networks, I had the privilege of spending an hour chatting with Grace—a moment carved out of time in which our conversation drifted easily, from mutual friends to obnoxious Edinburgh flat parties, to the complicated ways intimacy forms and fractures between people. It felt fitting, as Murray’s debut novel is preoccupied with precisely these uneasy spaces: between self-knowledge and self-deception, desire and disgust, love and control.
First-year Grace likely did not imagine that the stand-alone story she had written would later secure her a place on the selective Penguin WriteNow programme. As she recounts, being paired with a mentor—who later became her editor—proved crucial to the novel’s development. “She helped with everything, even confidence building,” Grace explains, and that professional acknowledgement—the reassurance that her work was “worthy of time and attention”—ultimately enabled Blank Canvas to take shape as a novel.
The novel follows Charlotte, described by Grace as an “unhinged, repressed, deceptive, often quite cruel” British final-year art student studying at the Institute, an upstate New York liberal arts college. Charlotte opens her story with a lie—that her father has died. From there, a web of people, feelings, and moments begins to coil around her deception, tightening as the lies multiply, until everything slowly unravels.
It is through the character of Katarina—described by Grace as “a kind of alternate figure of Charlotte”—that Charlotte begins her own journey of becoming. Through their mutual co-dependency, Charlotte and Katarina drift in and out of other people’s lives, introducing us to Tom, Matthew, Tamsyn, Giulia, and others navigating their own internal selves—though Grace does not spare them the subtle satire of their often eccentric personalities. Moving between the United States, England, and Italy, the novel unfolds like an intimate voyage through Charlotte’s mind and the meanings she assigns to the world around her.
Yet lingering beneath it all is an unresolved question: what does Charlotte make of herself? At times insufferable, Charlotte is nevertheless driven by a deeply human desire; as Grace reflects, “at the end of the day she just wants to be loved.” Quietly, the novel reveals her vulnerabilities: in the comfort of a morning cup of coffee, in lying on the floor trying to conjure something for her canvas, in moments of stillness that puncture her cruelty.
When asked why she chose to write from the perspective of an overthinking liar, Grace explained that her motivation stemmed from an interest in “how much we lie to ourselves, and how much we’re in control of our desire and thoughts.” Desire, she notes, becomes entangled with disgust, hatred, and bodily anxiety—particularly in Charlotte’s case. “And because she is filled with self-deception,” Grace reflects “I thought the lie was the best place to begin.”
Queer relationships take centre stage, with Grace noting that “there is a bit of a gap when it comes to lesbian fiction—or lesbian anything, really.” Drawing inspiration from novels such as Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and Mrs. S by K. Patrick, sexuality becomes a lens through which Charlotte experiences the world, and through which she begins to form herself. Grace describes the novel as an “immoral coming of age,” one in which Charlotte is “learning how to be a person in a way that she was never taught as a kid—by being loved and exposed by other people, especially Katarina.”
The novel is also threaded with subtler reflections on class, religion, and the lingering presence of trauma. Set “somewhere close enough that Charlotte could get away with most of her lies, but far away culturally so that class status could be disguised,” the story gestures towards these tensions through figures such as Charlotte’s father, who lives a quiet, unornamented life in Linchfield, unaware of the emotional distance his daughter has constructed. Trauma, in particular, is handled with restraint—a choice Grace describes as “tricky… to say the least.” Conscious of the risks surrounding the aestheticisation of trauma, she was cautious not to romanticise it, instead weaving it into the narrative as a means of deepening the characters’ complexities. Indeed, what stood out most to me was the novel’s careful character-building: each figure feels deeply human, marked by ambiguity, unlikability, tenderness, and contradiction.
I hesitate to reveal more, as doing so would diminish the pleasure of reading—a pleasure Grace herself hopes readers will find, even amid the darkness, in “an occasional chuckle here and there.” It is a hope fulfilled—as the marginal scribbles scattered throughout my copy of the book can attest.
Our conversation did not end with the novel. Grace spoke candidly about her journey as a writer—from juggling part-time jobs, university, and friendships, to becoming a published author at FigTree. When asked how she managed it all, she laughed: “If you talk to my friends, I cancelled a lot of plans,” trading them instead for “late nights, a lot of coffee, and panics.” What sustained her through moments of doubt was a quiet conviction that, if there was one thing she could do, it was writing.
On confidence, Grace reflected that writing offers a unique form of presence: “your work can be seen without you actually ever having to be there… a way of being present that is actually absent.” Her advice to aspiring writers is to resist comparison and fight self-consciousness. Every book on a shelf, she reminded me, has been through countless drafts; it is “impossible and really cruel” to measure early work against a finished product.
As our conversation drew to a close, Grace hinted at a new work in progress, describing writing as “a kind of chase—I’m always after something; a moment of satisfaction that never arrives.” Almost without pause, she has already begun her second novel.
Now, whenever I think of Charlotte and Katarina, I imagine them living inside Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Lit (The Bed)—a painting that appears in Blank Canvas, and one Grace herself returned to during our conversation. Their time together feels contained within a single moment: lying beside one another, talking, laughing, discovering themselves through intimacy. It is this belief in the possibility of change—that one is “not only defined by what is bad, but also by what is good,” as Grace puts it—that she hopes readers will take from Blank Canvas.
A proof copy of Blank Canvas was kindly provided to The Student by Penguin Random House UK. Images provided by Penguin Random House UK.