Mind How You Go

What would you do if you had only months to live?

Iris has known for weeks that her heart is failing—the same hereditary condition that killed her mother three years ago. But instead of hiding in London where she's spent the last eight years running from her past, she does something unexpected: she comes home.

Home is Morleigh, a windswept coastal town where everyone knows your secrets and the sea breathes eternal rhythms against ancient cliffs. Home is the house where her mother Eleanor died, where roses still grow wild in the neglected garden, where her father Ray waits with eight years of silence and bitterness carved into his face.

"You look just like her. It still hurts to see you."

These are Ray's first words to his only daughter. They're not welcoming, but they're honest—and Iris has come home for honesty. She's come to forgive and be forgiven, to make peace with her father before cancer takes him, to document with her mother's camera the beauty that exists in endings.

What she doesn't expect is Samuel.

A carpenter with careful hands and a kinder heart than the world deserves, Samuel is trapped in an engagement to a woman he doesn't love, caring for his sister Clara—an eight-year-old with the wisdom of someone who's already lost too much. When Samuel's fiancée wants to institutionalize Clara, he must choose between duty and love, between what's expected and what's right.

As Iris and Samuel are drawn together, she discovers her mother's greatest secret: a decades-long affair with Samuel's father, a love that was real but impossible, a choice that poisoned two marriages and shaped everything that followed.

The parallels are devastating. Iris is repeating her mother's pattern—falling for an engaged man, loving despite impossible circumstances, choosing truth over safety. But unlike Eleanor who died with regrets, Iris has a chance to do it differently: to confess her love, to forgive her father, to live fully in whatever time remains.

There's just one problem. Iris is hiding her diagnosis from everyone, especially Samuel. She tells herself it's kindness, protecting him from the pain of loving someone who's dying. But when Clara asks with heartbreaking directness, "Are you ending too?", Iris must decide: Will she spend her remaining months building walls or bridges? Will she die with words unsaid, or will she risk her heart one final time?

A story about:

Perfect for readers who loved The Midnight Library, Before I Go, The Light We Lost, and Me Before You—but with a quieter, more literary approach to terminal illness and love.

Mind How You Go doesn't offer easy answers about death or healing. Instead, it asks us to sit with uncomfortable truths: that loving means grieving, that presence requires courage, that some of the most meaningful relationships are the briefest.

This is a novel about photography and roses, secret affairs and small-town gossip, a child who paints grief into beauty and a man who builds sanctuaries for the dying. But mostly, it's about the space between hello and goodbye—and how we choose to fill those fleeting, precious moments.

Because we're all dying. Some of us just know our timelines better than others.