LACUNAE

Missing, Most Likely, Happily, Dead

What happens when the first person you ever loved becomes the one you can no longer bear to watch die?

Adam grows up believing in simple truths: mothers know best, fathers are invincible, and childhood can be navigated by doing as little as possible-least said, soonest mended. But as he steps from the quiet rituals of family life into the confusing realms of religion, desire, morality, and death, he discovers that nothing about growing up is simple. And nothing about being a family is clean.

From the smoky kitchens, storm-soaked valleys, and schoolyard humiliations of 1950s Yorkshire to the claustrophobic tensions of a household breaking under its own unspoken history, LACUNAE traces a life built on gaps-gaps in memory, gaps in truth, and the painful gaps between the people we love and the people they truly are.

At the centre of Adam's world is Jane: brilliant, sharp, wounded, unbending, and utterly human. Through whisky-fuelled lessons, secret languages, and fiercely held philosophies, she shapes Adam's mind-and quietly fractures it.

And then comes the hardest lesson of all: how to watch someone you love disappear piece by piece.

Told with biting wit, psychological depth, and an unflinching gaze at the unspoken corners of British family life, LACUNAE is a literary coming-of-age novel that explores memory, guilt, religion, trauma, and the long shadow cast by childhood.

A story for anyone who has ever looked back and wondered which parts of their past were real... and which parts they simply survived.

Haunting, intimate, and deeply human-this is a novel that stays under the skin.