The Year In Between - my debut novel is available now!
My first ever novel, The Year In Between, is now available for purchase!
The book was a labour of love that took hundreds of hours to finish, but I’m aware that competition is fierce for your hard-earned money and the limited space on your bookshelf, so I’ve put together a short article to give you a better idea of the themes it explores and what to expect should you choose to read it.
What’s The Year In Between about?
In simple terms, it’s about a twenty-something graduate called Dan, who thinks he’s about to embark upon a high-flying career in London and change the world. But he unexpectedly loses his job, and without a backup plan, he’s forced to travel back to his dull hometown and move back in with his parents.
Surely there’s more to it than that?
Yes, there are definitely a few underlying themes to the novel. So many people I know around my age have a similar story. They grew up in a small town on the coast somewhere, didn’t see many opportunities to build a career and prosper, and decided to move to London to take their shot at finding success.
TYIB explores the gradual changes to an individual’s identity that occur as a consequence of their surroundings - both the places and the people. The lucky ones complete the leap to that affluent metropolitan lifestyle, but even for them, there’s an transitionary period where they don’t quite fit in with the city crowd, but have also alienated themselves from the people they grew up around.
And that’s the case for Dan?
Yes, and it’s even worse for him! He’s pushed out of the city back to his hometown while he’s in that in-between phase, so a large part of the book is about him having to reverse course and dial back the traits he’s adopted to support his career-oriented mindset to better connect with the people back home.
In doing so, he has to ask a lot of questions of himself. Was he somehow a purer version of himself during his formative years? How much of his personality is his own, versus a facade he adopted to get ahead in the City? If you behave a certain way for long enough, it inevitably becomes a part of you.
What was the writing process like?
In a word: long. I wanted to write a novel since I was very young, and started on what turned out to be TYIB at the beginning of 2016. Work was very stop-start, and the manuscript has been through many iterations and changes, from small tweaks to complete rewrites, stylistic adjustments, and plot overhauls.
A small silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns was that I had more time to write, and I completed the first full draft in 2021. Since then, I’ve spent hundreds of hours on further reviews and rewrites, but the toughest part of the process was to answer the question: Is it done yet?
Are you pleased with the result?
I don’t think TYIB is perfect, but I do think it has reached a point where it says most of what I want it to and my time is best spent on a new project. I’m somewhat prone to perfectionism, so without taking the leap and sending it out into the world, I could have been writing the same novel for the rest of my life.
I have no idea how it will be received, or if anyone will read it at all. I hope TYIB can provide somebody with some enjoyment or inspiration, but the biggest satisfaction for me is in having a finished book that I can hold in my hands. That’s something I’ve dreamt of for decades, and I wasn’t sure it would ever happen.
What’s coming next?
I worked for so long on TYIB that many of the characters and themes no longer reflect who I am as a person and what’s on my mind. That made certain sections of the book difficult to finish, but also means I have plenty of fresh ideas that I’d like to explore. I’m currently fleshing out the concept for a second novel, and have some words down on paper. I’ll try not to take eight years to finish it this time!
The Year In Between was published on 2nd September 2024 and is available to purchase now, both as a paperback book and via Amazon Kindle.
