Slender Threads

Richard Hunter, self styled poet and mystic, has built a life around his dreams, around conversation with his various daemons, and the delicate imaginal work of attending to what really matters in life. But then he finds himself the unexpected custodian of an underground AI magazine called The Lantern, built by a tech billionaire friend who has disappeared. Already surging in popularity with aspiring poets, the literary world can't decide whether to dismiss or adore it.

So, as The Lantern teases poets out of their obscurity, it also threatens to pull down a weight of institutional scorn on Richard's head, disturbing the peace of his remote hillside home, which he shares with various ghosts and shy presences. Now he has Sibylla, a county grandee, circling him ominously, and Ffion, a rival editor of a magazine in decline, nursing a wounded pride, all distracting from the work he set himself out to do. So does he shut the magazine down and return to the simpler life? Or does it serve a purpose that is bigger than he realises, and must be preserved at all costs?

And what price to him personally as it crowds out his life with its delicate relationships? What of Miriam, his uncanny housekeeper, offering him a stillness he can't fathom, and depths he fears he could drown in? And what of Amanda, the parish's newly promoted vicar, coming at him with a directness he isn't always brave enough to meet head on?

A sequel to The Archivist of Endings, Slender Threads is a novel about love without possession, about finding the courage it takes to call yourself what you've always been, and it's about the slender threads – a poem, an observed breath, a hand held briefly to the cheek – that hold our lives together and grant them meaning, far more than the grander things we imagine are important.