Voices

<p>Dean has spent his whole life listening.</p><p>As a boy he waits at a small harbour for a father who works at sea and rarely comes home. At the kitchen table he dodges his mother's sharp tongue and clings to his older brother John who is part guardian angel part walking disaster. The house is full of noise but no one is saying what really matters.</p><p>Years later Dean is a grown man with a steady job a decent flat and a heart that won't stop racing. The voices are still with him: his father's silence his mother's judgments his brother's jokes and warnings. Every decision feels like an argument with people who aren't in the room.</p><p>When illness late-night phone calls and old letters force him back into his past Dean does the only thing he knows how to do-he writes. Not quite memoir not quite fiction his book becomes a way to put his ghosts on the page and finally talk back.</p><p>From a harbour bench to a hospital corridor from a crowded dinner table to a small room with a blue curtain <em>Voices</em> follows Dean across three stages of his life as he slowly realises that the people he can't let go of are also the parts of himself he's never learned to accept.</p><p>Tender honest and quietly devastating <em>Voices</em> is a novel about:<br>• Brothers who love each other more than they know how to say<br>• Parents who do their best and still get it wrong<br>• The guilt of missed calls and conversations that come too late<br>• The small stubborn victories of showing up anyway</p><p>If you've ever replayed an argument in your head for years wished you could call someone who isn't there anymore or loved a brother so fiercely it scared you this story will feel like it was written with you in mind.</p>