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

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Fray is drenched in atmosphere, and the imagery it produces transports you to the highlands for this evocative tale of grief and loss. Chris was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 40 and is a passionate advocate for mental health awareness. I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Fray at Brome Lake Books; it seems to be a mystery with an appealing cover, and an Alan Cumming blurb the conjures up Masterpiece Classics. As both a runner and someone who loves the wild landscape of the Scottish Highlands this book transported me to a thoroughly engrossing world.

Chris Carse Wilson is a debut author and lifelong runner who uses exercise and nature to manage his mental health.Guilt ridden by an argument that may have propelled their father's plight, the protagonist arrives in the Highlands, attempting to piece together what has happened to their father and come to terms with their own grief and guilt. You can just feel the urgency of it, how much it must have meant to capture the feelings in these pages. There is a striving throughout the book to deal with personal demons and come out of them with a peace of mind. I go into these reads genuinely hoping to find a marmite-read that I find to be a delicious bitter-sweet delight. The low rating indicates to me that it has at least done something unique and different and isn’t just a “mediocre people-pleaser”.

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? The narrator’s mother died some time ago, and shortly afterwards their father disappeared, apparently unable to accept what had happened. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The narrator has now traced their father to this cottage – he’s not there himself, but the place is full of papers and maps written and drawn by his hand.In reality, the experience is often very much like the one I had with actual marmite: I hate it, and now understand why others do to.

This author knows how to use language to great effect to create a feeling, to create an atmosphere to create a real intensity, The short sharp sentences, next to the long rambling ones create a stream of consciousness so you feel like you’re in the narrators head. But one thing that I knew before I was doing that all this stuff is I have to run in the morning, before I go, as a way of managing my anxiety in advance. 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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Had the author stopped at that 25% mark, it would’ve been a 4-star story, and nothing much would’ve been lost. I’m always impressed when the written word evokes strong feelings and emotions; perhaps made easier by the similarities between it’s story and mine.