Novels
Amanda
England in the 1920s is a nation in turmoil, its foundations shaken by the Great War and the collapse of genteel Edwardian society. The streets are haunted by shell-shocked men, runaways, mutilated veterans, damned poets, and revolutionaries. Marion has fled Galway for Oxford after her elopement with a violent man ended violently. In the City of Dreaming Spires, where the cobbled streets, barely lit pubs, and underground book presses hum with restless energy, she meets Jamie, a damaged soul like her who is struggling to recover from his experiences at the front. He alone sees her scars. She alone knows his secret name. Their love is wild, dangerous, and absolute. Everything, it seems, is at stake. At once an erotic drama, a formally inventive romantic epic, and a historical novel written with an emotional intensity, Amanda is a poignant, atmospheric meditation on love, trauma, and redemption.
Coming September 23, 2025
Grievous
Set in 1931 at St. Stephen’s Academy, a boys’ boarding school in Yorkshire, Grievous focuses on teacher John Grieves (nicknamed Grievous) and his student Gray Riding. Gray begins a secret correspondence with John’s 13-year-old goddaughter, Cordelia, while John is in love with her mother. The action—at the Academy and across England and the Continent—includes love, betrayal, illness, grief, Quakers, morphine, theater, and second chances.
Wilberforce
England, 1926. At St. Stephen’s Academy, the students are on the verge of revolt. While the younger boys plot an insurrection, the older ones are preoccupied with sneaking out-of-bounds, thrashing each other, tearing each other’s clothes off—or some combination of the three. Morgan Wilberforce, for one, can’t take it any longer.
Wilberforce is an indelible portrait of a young man caught between lust and cruelty, grief and God, frustrated love and abject longing.
Essays
- I Kissed the Rod – discussing Ernest Raymond’s Tell England in The Paris Review
- Em-Dashes for dialogue, why + how
- Fags and Faggots, history of these words
- A Playlist for Grievous
- A Playlist for Wilberforce
- Writers Read
Conversations
- Slipping Into Imaginary Worlds, with Lian Hearn
- In the Footsteps of the Inklings, with Carol and Philip Zaleski in LA Review of Books
- Let Go the Reins, craft with Jessie Chaffee
- Work-in-Progress, discussing Grievous with Leslie Pietrzyk
- Books and Boarding Schools, a Christmas chat on The Living Church podcast