First published 2020
Damien, a teenage foster child in southeast London, discovers fragments of his mother's abandoned life scattered across old photographs and fragmentary memories. As he pieces together her mysterious disappearance, he confronts a labyrinth of institutional silence and family secrets that have kept him disconnected from his origins. Each recovered detail threatens to unravel his understanding of belonging, identity, and the thin lines between remembrance and invention. His search becomes a raw, recursive exploration of how absence shapes a young person's sense of self. The novel tracks Damien's intricate reconstruction—part detective work, part emotional archaeology—as he navigates foster care bureaucracies, incomplete records, and the psychological landscape of maternal loss. What emerges is not just a search for a missing parent, but an urgent reckoning with how personal history gets erased, reconstructed, and reimagined.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: London, Southeast London
Period: contemporary
64 pages · Paperback · Bloodaxe Books
Content warnings: mental-illness