Lead the Way

Some summers change everything.

Sent to spend the summer with his aunt in a village he's never heard of, working a café job he didn't ask for, sixteen-year-old Ben Farley has already decided that caring about things is more trouble than it's worth.

Then he meets Finley: warm, infuriatingly perceptive, and completely unwilling to accept Ben's apathy. And across a summer of disastrous folk dancing, rainy walks, and one breathtaking night beneath the stars, Ben discovers something he thought he'd safely buried: the alarming, inconvenient fact that he actually cares.

Twenty-six years earlier, a girl named Erin stood behind the same café counter and had a summer that should have changed her life, when she fell in love with someone she wasn't supposed to -before she made a choice that she would spend the rest of her life quietly grieving.

Funny, romantic, tender and quietly heartbreaking, Lead the Way is the beautiful new novel from Leon Egan, author of Lover Birds, shortlisted for the YA Book Prize and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

About the author

Leon Egan (he/they) is a trans author from Liverpool. Shortly after graduating from an MA in Publishing, the world fell apart, so mostly he’s just been getting a lot of writing done. Leon is the writer and producer of scripted fiction podcast Tell No Tales and their debut YA novel Lover Birds published in 2024.