The Barn Door Stayed Closed

I'm thrilled to announce the release of my second novel.

We're familiar with the traditional settings of broken children in literature: concrete estates, cramped tower blocks, and city streets. We're familiar with the causes. County lines and gang loyalty. Turf wars and violence. Status measured in territory and allegiances. The familiar landscapes where damaged children are made, right?

But trauma doesn't respect postcodes.

Twelve-year-old Alex lives in different geography entirely. Stone farmhouse walls instead of concrete. Open fields where you can see for miles instead of cramped estates where threat lives around every corner. His status comes from his grandfather's patient teaching—lambing sheds before dawn, reading frost patterns, measuring wheat growth. Life cycles instead of violence cycles. Natural rhythms instead of territorial wars. Beauty instead of brutality. Safe walls. Open spaces. Generations of stability.

Except trauma doesn't respect postcodes. And when it finds Alex, it destroys everything.

THE BARN DOOR STAYED CLOSED tells the story where isolation is measured in miles of empty fields rather than tower block floors. Where loss echoes across generations of worked land. Where external forces ripple into intimate spaces and destroy what they touch. Where a boy can be broken just as completely among lambs and wheat as in any urban estate.

This is not a farming book, though farming shapes every page.

This is not a political book, though a political act sets everything in motion.

This is a story about a child's devastation. One that unfolds where marmalade skies meet muddy yards, where beauty and brutality exist side by side, and where the closed barn door becomes a monument to everything that cannot be undone.