The Between Place

When grief counsellor Elias Vance loses his wife Mara without warning, he discovers that the man who spent sixteen years helping others navigate loss has no idea how to navigate his own. Then something begins to happen that his training has no category for. Mara has not gone where he thinks she has gone. And the world - the ordinary, rain-grey, coastal world of his everyday life - is not what it appears to be. The Between Place is a novel about grief, but it is not a sad book. It is about what love becomes when it is tested beyond its apparent limits - what remains when everything changes, what a grieving rationalist must discover when the ground shifts beneath his certainties and something far older and stranger than reason begins to speak. Part love story, part spiritual odyssey, part quiet revolution in the way we understand consciousness and loss - it asks the oldest questions and answers them not with doctrine but with story, not with certainty but with the particular light that only comes through the cracks. Read it and you will not see an ordinary Tuesday the same way again.

About the Author

A psychiatrist by profession, humanist by nature, dreamer and artist by birth, writer by some grace she does not fully understand. A childhood spent in Africa and travelling in Europe, a youth in India, a professional life in Australia — not a biography so much as a series of borders crossed until the borders stopped mattering and what remained was simply a deep curiosity about what human beings share underneath everything that appears to divide them. This novel is the fruit of that curiosity, and of the quiet conviction — confirmed again and again across cultures, consulting rooms, and the ordinary extraordinary encounters of a life lived wide — that beneath the different clothes and different names for the same longing, something in every person is recognisable. Something in every person is already home.