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My Personal Journey
Broken Rooms follows a gifted mathematician from Sheffield who stumbles into the world of design, beauty, and wealth, and winds up searching for authenticity in a life caught between duty, desire, and dreams. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It is very much a memoir of my personal journey as an adult. While I am not a mathematician, I was a classically trained pianist with a Doctorate in music. Once I completed my degree and still performing, I had 58 students and I slaved away at an existence that not only drained me, but longing for something that was inside of me. I had always been interested in design and beauty, and it was as though I had yet to break through the ceiling of who I truly am. While I had the highest degree in piano, it was only the beginning of my creative journey. The thread of experiences throughout the novel are all based on what I actually experienced while naturally embellishing on some characters, places and circumstances for the sake of colourful storytelling. But even these I had witnessed and recorded as part of my experience and wove them into the story with delight.
Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your character’s life?
Yes, the story told from Sebastian’s point of view is very much me. I related to the character for he is sort of a doppelgänger albeit English. Throughout the pages it is really me telling the story of me.
I find that authors sometimes ask themselves questions and let their characters answer them. Do you think this is true for your characters?
Yes very much so. The questions I have had about clients, colleagues, lovers and myself I answered through all the characters. As though holding up a mirror and looking at it all as the director of the play as opposed to the actors.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
Broken Rooms is a novel (yet only covering my life and career as an adult). My next book is an actual memoir and titled Remains of Silence : A Memoir of Breaking, Building, and Becoming. It is a raw and true telling of my childhood and upbringing in Apartheid South-Africa. I shed light on the horrors of our school system, the neglect and abuse at home, and my final departure out into the wide world where I became Sebastian, the main character of Broken Rooms. In Remains of Silence there are no fictitious characters or stories, only an honest telling of what was and how I finally changed the ingrained choreography in order to break free. The book will be released on September 15, 2025. Links will be sent to you.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Yet behind every elegant room lies fracture. From Paris salons to New York penthouses, from Marrakesh courtyards to English country estates, Sebastian’s designs reflect not only beauty but also the emptiness and longing that shape his own life.
At its center lies a restrained love story between two men—Sebastian and Duncan—that simmers in silence, distance, and restraint before finally blossoming into the promise of permanence.
Blending the sensual detail of a design memoir with the emotional pull of a love story, Broken Rooms is for readers of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook, and Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue. It is a novel of reinvention, restraint, and the universal search for belonging, intimacy, and wholeness.
Broken Rooms
Broken Rooms is both a memoir and a novel, though it never settles quietly into one category. It tells the story of Sebastian Cole, a gifted mathematician from Sheffield who stumbles into the world of design, beauty, and wealth through a fateful meeting with Lady Judy Beardsley. What begins as weekend tutoring spirals into an immersion in luxury, power, and temptation. The book follows him through grand houses in London, decadent travels, passionate but destructive relationships, and the search for authenticity in a life caught between duty, desire, and dreams. This is a story about reinvention. It is about the tension between longing for beauty and grappling with the shadows of shame, heartbreak, and secrecy.
Reading it, I felt pulled into Sebastian’s inner world in a way that was both thrilling and heartbreaking. The writing is lush, almost cinematic, full of detail about fabrics, food, interiors, and scents. Sometimes, I caught myself pausing just to savor the descriptions of a chandelier or the taste of a Tarte Tatin. At other times, the excess weighed on me, the same way Sebastian is weighed down by the very luxuries he covets. I found myself admiring the author’s ability to weave emotion into objects, to make a velvet curtain or a marble foyer feel like characters themselves. Yet I also wrestled with frustration at Sebastian’s self-sabotage, at his naivety, at his constant return to toxic people who drained him. That tension kept me hooked, even when I wanted to shout at him to run in the opposite direction.
On a personal level, I connected with the book’s exploration of longing and identity. The novel is about design, yes, but beneath the wallpaper and chandeliers, it is about a man trying to carve out a place for himself in a world that doesn’t quite accept him. That struggle felt raw and real. There were moments that made me laugh, and others that left me sitting in silence, heavy with empathy. At times, I found the prose almost indulgent, yet that indulgence mirrors Sebastian’s journey. It is the language of someone intoxicated by beauty, love, and possibility, even when those things unravel. The book made me think not only about art and design, but also about how we all build rooms, real and emotional, to house our deepest desires.
Broken Rooms is not for everyone. Its pace lingers, its details are rich to the point of decadence, and its protagonist can be both magnetic and exasperating. But for readers who appreciate personal storytelling dressed in velvet and candlelight, who want to be transported into salons and safaris while also being invited into the quiet ache of the heart, this book will be a gift. I’d recommend it to lovers of memoir, design, travel writing, and anyone who has ever chased beauty while carrying their own brokenness.
Pages: 340 | ASIN : B0FNWB1LZL
LITERARY TITAN 