Fray: The haunting and mysterious new literary suspense novel of 2023, for fans of bestsellers THE LONEY and PINE

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You can just feel the urgency of it, how much it must have meant to capture the feelings in these pages. It’s a spiral into the depths of grief and guilt, featuring a break from reality that culminates in a final sequence that is both surreal and meaningful.

But if you keep going - exactly like with running - if you keep doing bit and a bit, regularly and you don’t get put off when it gets tough, you don't give up and you've just kind of persist, then actually over time, you can really put something quite phenomenal together, whether that's training for a marathon and ultra or writing a novel. This intensity that I'm feeling in this moment of panic trying to get down off the side of the mountain safely, is the same experience that I want a reader to have reading the book.Yes, my parents were both runners, they got into it because of the Great North Run, and I sort of followed on. The problem is that the same word also attached to people who may have extreme anxiety conditions that will totally derail their lives. DNF - this started with a lot of potential and I genuinely didn't mind the experimental format, but the level of repetition in each of the segments made this a huge challenge to read- particularly with the main perspective. The cottage floor and the few pieces of furniture are covered in scraps of paper in what he takes to be his father’s handwriting. So I guess running is for you both a tool for managing mental health but, in a way, it’s also a metaphor for it?

Yes, where I live, just over the water from Dundee, I can run up the hill at the back of the house and within five minutes I'm on to farm tracks and paths.A deeply haunting book … The Scottish Highlands have never felt more wild or alive than they do in this … immensely important novel. Hearst UK is the trading name of the National Magazine Company Ltd, 30 Panton Street, Leicester Square, London, SW1Y 4AJ. The bleak and inhospitable nature around her creates a stark background for our unnamed protagonists grief and guilt over her double loss; the loss of someone missing without resolve, and the loss of someone certainly gone for good. Fray is an exceptional and haunting debut, very reminiscent of the work of Max Porter … I absolutely loved it. Haunting, gripping, a visceral portrayal of movement and mountains and the outdoors and the power and chaos of our own minds.

It reads a bit like a radio play with three different voices, though for one of the voices I still have no idea who was speaking. I have just been focusing on enjoying it actually, because I have a terrible habit of overdoing it or getting injured or just kind of being a bit over enthusiastic with training too hard. It is written as a reflection of a spiralling mind with lots of disjointed descriptions and repetition. A twisting tale of grief and mental health that sucked me in from the start and swept me along with it … I couldn’t put it down. To me, there just was no point to reliving that experience, without any pay-off or new insight to be gained.

It’s actually a wildly immersive exploration of grief, guilt, and mental illness, mediated by nature, running, and intentionality. The nature of the writing as much a part of the chaotic atmosphere as the depiction of the Scottish Highlands within. So the last couple of years I’ve actually run without a watch, just getting out and enjoying it and that’s actually been fantastic. and I think I'm not the right audience for it; I simply didn't have patience for the extreme (and intentional) repetitiveness of the prose. In short: a bleak, disjointed “wandering” of text, that has a single message and “feeling” to convey.