Reintroducing The Light Between Us — and the boy who tries to catch the light
Every debut novel feels a bit like stepping into the open with your heart in your hands. The Light Between Us was mine — the first time I let readers into a world built from memory, music, sketchbooks, and that strange, lovely ache of growing up.
At its centre is Sean O’Connell: fourteen, new to North London, quietly observant… and already carrying more than most people can see. He’s the “new boy” in a school where everyone else seems to know the rules, the shortcuts, the right way to sit at a desk without looking like you’re trying too hard. Sean’s not trying to be interesting. He’s trying to be steady.
But then there’s art class. A crooked tree on the school field. And a feeling he can’t quite name yet — the one that arrives when you realise the thing you love might actually be the thing you’re meant to do.
Who Sean is (and why I love writing him)
Sean is the kind of character who notices everything — not in a showy way, but in the way that feels intimate. The way light shifts. The way a room sounds. The way a moment can change you if you let it.
He’s also stubborn — the quiet, brave sort of stubborn that doesn’t look like rebellion until it suddenly does.
When someone dismisses what matters to him, Sean doesn’t have a grand speech ready. He just tells the truth, even if his voice shakes:
“They’re not doodles… I’m trying to get light right.”
That’s Sean in a nutshell: a boy trying to learn the world properly — by seeing it, not just moving through it.
Sean and the sentence he carries like a compass
Early on, Sean meets someone who changes the temperature of his life: Linda. She sees him, properly — not as “the new kid” but as a person with a gift still forming in his hands.
And she gives him a line that becomes a kind of anchor:
“It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be yours.”
Sean doesn’t just hear that sentence — he keeps it. He carries it home. He repeats it out loud like a small act of courage:
“It just has to be yours,” he said…
If you’ve ever needed permission to be a beginner, to be messy, to try anyway — Sean knows that feeling.
The heart of Sean: wanting, without knowing how to ask
One of the things I wanted most for Sean was tenderness — especially the kind that’s hard-earned. He grows up in the gravity of a military father who believes in “subjects with weight” and a future you can “stand up in.” Sean’s world is discipline, routine, moving house, learning not to take up too much space.
And yet, inside him, there’s this stubborn hope that art is discipline — that learning to look is a kind of strength:
“Drawing is discipline… You have to look till it stops pretending.”
Later, when photography enters his life, Sean’s longing becomes clearer — not just to capture beauty, but to keep the truth of things.
A friend asks him why he photographs the same cat again and again, and Sean answers in the most Sean way possible — thoughtful, earnest, slightly embarrassed by how much he means it:
“Because it’ll look different in the print… The cat will be… more itself.”
That’s Sean: someone trying to make the world feel less temporary.
A quick word from early readers
One of the loveliest things about releasing my debut was seeing what readers picked up on — the warmth, the voice, the “bent, not broken” theme running underneath the story.
As one reviewer put it, this book is:
“a ray of sunshine and a healing hug… a cozy blanket… with a side of comfort food”
Honestly — that’s exactly what I hoped it would feel like.
If you’re new here…
The Light Between Us is a story about first connection and second chances — about the kind of love that can go quiet for years and still recognise itself when it returns. And Sean is the heart of that: a boy learning how to be himself in a world that keeps telling him to be something else.
If you’ve read it already, I’d love to know: what was your “Sean moment” — the scene or line that stuck with you?
And if you haven’t yet… come and meet him. He’ll be by the window, watching the light, trying to learn its language.
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