Scribe
A Novel
A novel about the distance between what we write and what we mean — and the strangers who find the difference.
“A debut of startling precision. The prose moves like a held breath — every sentence aware of its own weight.”
— Starred Review, Winter 2025
Competition Recognition
Bridport Prize
Novel Excerpt · Shortlisted
2025
Bath Novel Award
Literary Fiction · Longlisted
2025
Caledonia Novel Award
Open Category · Shortlisted
2024
“I read the first chapter on a Tuesday and cancelled my plans for Wednesday. I needed to know how it ended. I still don't, and it's destroying me in the best way.”
She had been revising the same sentence for eleven days. Not the words — those had settled into their final arrangement months ago, the syntax locked, the rhythm she could tap on the table without looking. What she kept revising was what came after the period. The silence the sentence left. Whether a reader, arriving at that full stop, would feel the same faint vertigo she had felt the morning she wrote it, standing in the kitchen at four a.m. while the city pressed its face against the window and asked nothing of her.
She pressed her palm flat against the manuscript page, as if warmth could travel through paper and into the past.
The manuscript was still warm from the printer.
— The chapter continues for another forty-two pages. —
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“There's a paragraph on page thirty-one — I won't tell you which one — where I had to put the manuscript down and go stand in my garden. It's been three months. I still think about it on the bus.”
“I stake my reputation on early discoveries. I've been wrong twice in twelve years of doing this. I am not wrong about this book. Whatever it costs you to get your hands on it — it will cost less than missing it.”
“I pre-ordered based on a single paragraph someone posted in our Discord. The paragraph was four sentences long. I've since re-read those four sentences forty times. I need the rest of the book the way I need sleep.”
The man who read her novel on the train from Edinburgh to London did not know her name. He had found the advance copy in the seat pocket — no author, no title page, just 247 pages bound with a single rubber band and a card that read: If you finish it, leave it for the next person.
He read through Carlisle. Through Preston. Through Crewe. His coffee went cold in his hand. At Euston he sat for eleven minutes after the train emptied, because he had reached page 246 and there was still one page left and he understood, the way you understand certain things about music and weather, that the last page was going to
change everything
— The sentence completes on page 191. —
You know where this is going.
Two ways to find out how it ends.
The Unmapped Hours — arriving 2026