Excerpt from The Names by Florence Knapp, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cora raises a hand to thank a driver. "Ah, but you do. It's just something no one else knows about," she says as they cross. "Maia means mother. I can show you in my book of baby names when we get home."

"Does it actually?" Cora is surprised at how happy this makes her daughter. "So why aren't we calling him something that just means Dad?"

Cora looks at the baby, whose full-moon face peeps out from his oversized snowsuit. She stops pushing for a moment and leans into his cocoon of talc-scented air. His eyes flutter with excitement on meeting hers, his swaddled limbs cycling frantically in celebration. He is not a Gordon. She blinks I love you, then straightens back up. "You know, I did actually look at which names mean father and the one I liked was Julian, which is sky father."

To Cora, it implies transcending a long line of troubled earth fathers, and for a while she'd wondered if it might be a name Gordon would compromise on. If it means father, if it's still a tribute to him, surely that's almost as good? But home early one evening, the book of names open face-down on the sofa, he'd picked it up, scanned the splayed pages for a moment. Just the girls' names, remember, Cora. We have Gordon for a boy. And when he'd snapped the book shut and placed it back on the shelf, the idea of a conversation somehow put away too.

"I like Julian," Maia says.

"Me too. What would you call him though?" Cora asks. "If you could choose anything?"

"Well," she says, and Cora can tell by the way she stretches out the word that she's already thought about it. "It's not a very normal sort of name, but I like Bear."

"Bear?" Cora asks, smiling. "Yes. It sounds all soft and cuddly and kind," Maia says, opening and closing her fingers as though she's scrunching sweetness in her hands. "But also, brave and strong." Cora looks at the baby and imagines him being all those things. She wants that for him.

Closer to town, the clear-up has already begun. Two men with chainsaws cut fallen lime trees into transportable chunks, leaving only shorn stumps in the pavement's tree pits.

Maia gives a shy wave to a small blonde girl whose hello is lost to the noise of machinery. And once they've passed, she tells Cora, "That's Jasmine. From ballet."

"Oh, yes, the one with the older sister at—"

"Sadler Swells. But I have a question," Maia says, finding her way back to their conversation before Cora has a chance to correct her. She takes a breath, as though she's about to ask something forbidden, and then says, "Why does it matter? To Dad, I mean. The same name thing."

Cora wants to say it matters because sometimes men feel small inside. Because some people—like Gordon's father—travel through life believing themselves so far improvement, they come to think their children, and their children's children, should all be made in their name. Because sometimes their need to please previous generations is greater than their need to love future ones. To Cora, it feels like a chest-beating, tribal thing. But she doesn't say any of this to Maia. She already picks up on enough. The morning after a disagreement, no matter how silently Cora has endured it, Maia will seek out at the kitchen sink, wrap her narrow arms around her and say, "My lovely mummy," her cheek resting against Cora's back. At those times, Cora feels the commiseration, the shared sadness. And once, the dampness on the fabric at the back of her dress where Maia's face had been moments earlier.

"Tradition is just important to some people," she says instead.

"Having your own name is too, though. Sometimes? Maybe even Dad would've liked having his own one."

Cora takes a hand off the pram to wrap her arm around Maia's shoulder. "Wise girl."

She wonders again if she is doing this right. Any of it, all of it. If it's even the right thing for Gordon himself to be carrying on this tradition. Maybe consenting to live in the shadow of his father and his father's father is only perpetuating the likeness, increasing the weight of it for him. Perhaps calling their child something different would be a liberation. Not at first, but later.

Excerpted from The Names by Florence Knapp. Copyright © 2025 by Florence Knapp. Excerpted by permission of Pamela Dorman Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.