The Boy From Sherwood Crescent
A novel of loss and love
Book launch coming this fall!
Sports journalist Carter Dawes drives three hours up the Lake Michigan shore for what should be a routine assignment: a few quotes from an old man as a favor to his sister, a tidy profile, nothing he’ll think about twice.
That is not the story the old man, Seth McLean, has been waiting to tell.
A boy who once caddied at his small Scottish hometown club, competed nationally as a teenager, then crossed an ocean at eighteen and built a life few would have predicted, Seth has reached its end with one thing left to do. Not to settle his affairs. Not to be remembered. But to set down a single story, in full, though he could not say for whom. Perhaps for the one person who arrived certain he didn’t need to hear it.
What Carter records over the weeks that follow has almost nothing to do with sport and everything to do with the distance he has always kept from his own family. By the end, the man who came to write it has been remade in ways the assignment never promised.
It is a novel of grief and grace, the long reach of a single day, and the conviction that no life is ever closed for good.
What does a boy become when grief arrives before he’s grown?
Just before Christmas, in a small Scottish town, eight-year-old Seth McLean lost his mother, his father, and his baby sister in a single night. He survived only because he was away from home, at his grandmother’s side. She raised him on faith and a stubborn kind of hope, and in time he learned to live with the scars no one could see. The wound heals, he would come to say. The scar remains.
Now, at the end of a long life, Seth has one story left to tell, and one more life to change.
He has never told it whole, not in more than seventy years. But the secret he finally speaks aloud, and the question it forces, will outlast him: can even the cruelest loss be turned, somehow, to good?
The Boy from Sherwood Crescent is a sweeping debut about a grandmother’s quiet faith, a wound that never fully closed, and a love that rose, impossibly, from the very loss that took everything from him.
He kept it for a lifetime.
Now it belongs to you.
Available for purchase on Amazon this fall!
