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Missteps of the Past
Bella & Rami begins with first love in 1980s India and follows two people whose lives continue in different directions while their connection quietly endures. Why did autofiction feel like the right form for this particular story?
For me, autofiction was the most natural way to tell the story of Bella and Rami, as it allowed me to move seamlessly between memory and imagination, incorporating bits and pieces from my life along the way. I wrote Bella and Rami because I wanted to understand a puzzle that had confounded me all my life: Why did two people who manifestly loved each other passionately fail to get together when young, and why had the connection been broken repeatedly? At first I turned to the tangible, my diary from 1980, the letters, photos and keepsakes that I had carried with me through my life. But the record was incomplete. Although I had hundreds of thousands of words written to me by Rami’s real-world counterpart, all of mine to him had been lost. Reading his letters was like looking through a window and seeing him on the other side of the pane – my own image a mere reflection on the glass. It seemed that the only way to go back in time was to imaginatively inhabit Bella and see how she moved through the world. So this is what I did. Autofiction allowed me to anchor the story in lived experience while moving forward in time with my characters, revealing more and more about their internal and external worlds as I went. It is an emotionally risky way to write, but it is a form that sits naturally alongside being a diarist and a letter writer, both of which are intimate forms of writing.
Bella and Rami often understand their relationship differently at different points in their lives. What did you want to explore through those changing perspectives?
Bella and Rami are intelligent, reflective people, and yet the stories that they carry within themselves affect how they hear what the other says, interpret what is written, and understand what is happening to them. I think that this is true for most of us: In ordinary life, our understanding is imperfect. For Bella and Rami, distance and time amplify this ambiguity, making it sharper and more consequential. In one of my early attempts to describe Bella & Rami, I said that it was about “the search for self and other that takes most of us a lifetime.” It is that journey that I wanted to explore.
Letters, diaries, emails, poems, and WhatsApp messages all become part of the storytelling. How does the evolution from handwritten letters to instant digital communication reflect the changing relationship between Bella and Rami?
Bella and Rami are shy, young people when they first meet. In the beginning, letters let them share intimate thoughts and feelings in a way that they might not have been able to express in person. However, the time delay between letter and response means that the threads of the conversation are often left hanging and unresolved. Time in and of itself is not enough to bring clarity to Bella. Reconnection, and a change in the physical means of communication, from letter to email to WhatsApp, is what enables Bella and Rami to finally work through the missteps of the past in more or less real time and fully appreciate their respective journeys.
What do you hope readers take from the novel about first love, memory, and the stories we carry about our own past?
That the first love experience is profound and stays with most of us a lifetime, that memory is imperfect and coloured by things we are not conscious of at the time, and that by revisiting our stories and bringing them into the present, sometimes, if we are lucky, we can make sense of them.
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Bella is an Australian schoolgirl living in 1980s India. Rami is an athlete just out of college, about to start life abroad. From the start, their connection is powerful and physical. As they navigate distance, family, trauma, and complicated lives, first love becomes something deeper, more complex, something impossible to forget.
When Rami disappears abruptly from Bella’s life, she is filled with foreboding. Has something happened? Is he okay? To find answers, she must return to the past and confront the shadows that shaped her. She must also find Rami and ask him to tell his story.
Lyrical, intimate, and emotionally fearless, Bella & Rami is a sweeping romance about the intensity of youth, the adversities of life, and a rare love that endures long after the first embrace.
The Worst In His Psyche
The Darkness Within follows a fading author who takes an experimental serum that restores his health and sends his creativity soaring, but also amplifies the violent darkness inside him. What first inspired the idea for The Darkness Within?
Frankly, I wanted to write something from an author’s perspective, but for a considerable length of time I was thinking of something along the lines of “Misery” by Stephen King. It wasn’t until I read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” that I realized that I wanted to do it along those lines in a modern-day reimagining.
How did you approach making Tanner someone readers could understand even as his actions become increasingly disturbing?
I truly believe that every indie publisher can utterly relate to Tanner’s hopes and fears… as well as his plight. Knowing that, I knew that I had to create a character who might be repulsive. The serum that Tanner ingests simply brings out the worst in his psyche. It serves as a megaphone. He’s a bit narcissistic, bitter, irritated, and angry. His worst qualities get amplified by the serum, and they are given an outlet and license to act through it.
Ambition is one of the novel’s central themes. What interested you about the emotional effects of reviews, rankings, sales, and other measures of creative success, and the point where healthy ambition can become destructive obsession?
Well, we’re all familiar with the effects of sending our books off into the ether riding on all our hopes and fears, and then seeing it fall flat, right? We must be gluttons for punishment because we do it over and over and over again. The drive is there to produce something people will love, that will sell well and resonate, that will climb up the charts, that will help us establish a career for doing this. But that drive can definitely become destructive. We are not our hustle, though we may think we are. We are a valuable human being independent of our hustle, and Tanner has to learn that the hard way.
Did writing a novel about an author’s obsession with success change the way you think about your own relationship with writing and publishing?
Sure, it made me commit to avoiding any and all genome-enhancing serums. 🙂
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A chilling reimagining of Jekyll and Hyde set inside the cutthroat world of self-publishing.
Struggling author Tanner Barrett is desperate for a breakthrough. When a mysterious serum offers a shortcut to the perfect book, he takes it… and something ancient and violent awakens inside him. The monster wears his face. It knows his enemies by name.
Told through deteriorating diary entries that crack and splinter in real time, The Darkness Within follows Tanner’s slow, irreversible unraveling. His career rises. His mind fractures. The line between the writer and the beast disappears.
What would you sacrifice to write the perfect book?
Literary horror at its most intimate and relentless. Tanner Barrett wanted to be remembered. He got his wish; just not the way he imagined. A slow-burn psychological descent that builds dread page by page and leaves an ending that stays with you.
Jeanne The Woman In Red
Jeanne The Woman in Red is a literary historical novel that follows the life of Jeanne Tunica Y Casas, a fiery, uncompromising political activist whose story unfolds across New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, France, and beyond. The book moves between her final years in a nursing home in the late 1960s and vivid recollections of her political battles, her marriage to Paco, and the people and places she loved. It’s a portrait of a woman who refuses to soften or apologize, even as age and loss begin to close in around her.
This book feels intimate. As if Jeanne were sitting across from me, telling stories that run on nerves and conviction rather than nostalgia. The writing has a rawness I didn’t expect. Scenes of the nursing home feel almost claustrophobic with their vinyl chairs, faint smells, and the slow drip of Jeanne’s frustration. Then the narrative swings wide open into her past, where she teaches children under mango trees, writes furious letters, argues politics with anyone brave enough, and paints scenes that reveal more about her spirit than any speech could. The author’s choice to weave Jeanne’s inner voice with historical detail gives the story both grit and tenderness. It is a quiet kind of political novel, but political all the same, carried by the force of one woman who refuses to be small.
What struck me most was how unapologetically the book stays with Jeanne’s contradictions. She is compassionate one moment and sharp enough to cut the next. She is grieving but stubborn. She is certain of her beliefs, sometimes to the point of alienating those who might have helped her. And yet the book never asks me to judge her. It just lets her be. Some passages read like memories folded in warm light, while others hit like sudden blows. The sensory details work best when they’re simple: a wooden floorboard Paco never fixed, a pot of chrysanthemums at a grave, the sound of children giggling through a vocabulary lesson. The author trusts these small images to carry weight, and they do.
This isn’t a sweeping epic or a fast-moving plot. It’s more like sitting with someone who has lived too intensely to fade gently. The genre sits somewhere between literary fiction and biographical historical fiction, and it will appeal most to readers who like character-driven stories, real history woven with imagination, and portraits of complicated women who challenge the world rather than charm it.
Pages: 213 | ASIN : B08CPNPNDV
The Ordinary Adventures of Somerset Soames von Hesse
The book traces the early life of Somerset Soames von Hesse, the youngest son in a missionary family that moves across continents. It follows the family from the United States to Egypt and Lebanon, then later to Colorado and beyond. The story blends personal memory with cultural snapshots. Each chapter unfolds against real historical moments, creating a timeline of growing up inside a strict religious framework while navigating friendships, dangers, family conflicts, school life, and a constant, restless search for belonging. It reads like a memoir wrapped inside a family saga, with Somerset watching the world while trying to figure out his place in it.
I found myself pulled in by the emotional honesty. The writing sometimes feels plainspoken, almost conversational, and that worked for me. It made the moments of fear, frustration, and longing hit harder. I felt a pang when little Wilfred nearly died after drinking kerosene, and the family’s panic filled the pages in a way that made me sit up straight. The author shows these moments without dressing them up. I liked that. At times, the prose wanders, but the wandering feels true to memory. I could almost hear someone telling me the story over a kitchen table. It made the world feel lived-in and messy and real.
Other times, I found myself laughing a little under my breath. Somerset’s charm, even as a tiny kid, is delightful. He’s wide-eyed, always scheming, always trying to impress girls, and it’s just so relatable. The book captures that childlike longing to be noticed, to matter, to be special. I felt protective of him. The chaotic moves, the strict expectations, and the way the adults often seem wrapped up in their own missions, while the kids try to make sense of everything around them. It stirred something in me. I kept thinking about how heavy the world can feel when you’re small and everyone else is busy doing “important things.”
By the end, I felt warm toward the story even when I was frustrated with some of the adults. I’d recommend this book to readers who enjoy memoir-style storytelling, especially people interested in missionary life, cross-cultural childhoods, or family histories full of both tenderness and hardship. It’s also a good pick for anyone who likes a slow, reflective read and doesn’t mind scenes that unfold more like memory than plot.
Pages: 462 | ASIN : B0FMSC22T8
