Stephen Jaques
An Accidental Author
New Novel release
clonfert
It took one hundred and eighty years to heal the source.
September 10th 1845. A woman in County Cork picks up a pen. September 10th 2025. A woman in Illinois opens her back door.
Between them — one hundred and eighty years.
Seven women.
One thread.
And a sentence that has been travelling through time for longer than anyone knew.
WELCOME - A BIT About ME...
I'm still working out what kind of novelist I am. Three books in, the answer seems to be: a different one each time.
I came to writing late and by accident. A carpenter and joiner by trade, I was fifty-three and had never written anything longer than a work report when my wife Tracey died in 2022. What followed should have been straightforward grief. It wasn't — the funeral itself went badly wrong, in ways that made the national press and left me with a complaint upheld against a company that faced no consequence for it. Bonkas came out of that: a dark, funny, unreliable-narrator novel set in supported housing, written by someone who had worked in it for years and knew exactly how the place sounded at three in the morning.
I wasn't sure whether I was a one-time author or something more. So in 2025 I resigned as a support worker and wrote The Barn Door Stayed Closed — the story of a twelve-year-old farm boy, told entirely in his own voice, after a line in a government budget takes his grandfather from him. All profits go to RABI, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution.
My third novel, Clonfert, is a dual-diary story of the Great Famine and its long reach: a woman in County Cork in 1845 and a woman in Illinois in 2025, writing on the same dates, one hundred and eighty years apart. I named it before discovering that Clonfert is the real parish name for Newmarket, County Cork — the town it's set in, and where my own family are buried.
A poetry collection, Lunatics & Space Age Watches, is on its way.
I publish through my own imprint, Small Hinges — named after a saying I've kept since I was a boy. Small hinges swing big doors.
I still live in South Wales. Still learning the craft.
The Barn Door Stayed Closed
Twelve-year-old Alex knows the blackbird sings twice. First song means get your boots on. Second song means you're late.
He's learning the farm the way his grandfather learned it, and his great-grandfather before that. Lambing sheds before dawn. Frost patterns. Which ewe is ready. All of it written down in a little red notebook, because proper farmers write things down.
Then a line in a government budget changes what his family's land is worth on paper.
One November morning the barn door is padlocked shut. There are police lights in the yard, and his father's hands are shaking, and nobody has fed the cattle. Don't open the barn door, Alex. Promise me. Inside the kitchen, adults are using words he knows but doesn't: inheritance, tax, pressure, couldn't see another way.
Three weeks later, a boy at school makes a joke about hanging.
The Barn Door Stayed Closed is the story of what a child does with grief nobody helped him carry, and of the thirty seconds that end two boys' futures at once. It goes where these stories usually don't — not a tower block or a city estate, but a working farm with open fields, generations of stability, and a family who thought they were safe.
Because trauma doesn't respect postcodes.
All profits go to RABI, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution.
Debut Novel - nov 24
Bonkas
Patrick Brady is the sanest man in the building. He'll tell you so himself.
At fifty-five he has lost his wife, his business and his home, and now he's at Treetops — a supported housing scheme in South Wales where the fire doors slam all night and the man in the room above runs a bath at one in the morning.
Around him: a nineteen-year-old who has been in the care system since he was six. A woman whose songs made somebody else famous. An ex-soldier counting out his Valium. A dealer with a diagnosis he invented when he was thirteen. And a health-and-safety officer who wants everything tickety-boo.
Patrick watches them all. He notices everything. He is the reliable one.
Then people start dying.
Bonkas is a darkly funny, uncomfortably honest novel about grief, institutional failure, and the stories people tell to keep themselves intact — narrated by a man who may be the last person in the building you should trust.
Read it once for the story. Read it again for the truth.