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

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Dark and atmospheric, Fray is chilling and very original. I couldn't put it down.' - Simon McCleave Apparently written in 20-minute bursts on the bus to his job as Communications Manager of V&A Dundee, and hidden from his wife until it was completed, Chris Carse Wilson’s debut novel is an intense study of grief and obsession, following two people who try to come to terms with bereavement by pushing themselves mentally and physically to their limits. 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?

Fray is an exceptional and haunting debut, very reminiscent of the work of Max Porter … I absolutely loved it. Chris Carse Wilson is a highly talented writer and Fray is filled with passages that resonated deeply with me’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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I'd been wrestling with how to honestly write about mental health and that moment of feeling so helpless and vulnerable against the landscape, against the weather – that was the spark. I knew this was my setting. This intensity that I'm feeling in this moment of panic trying to get down off the side of the mountain safely, is the same experience that I want a reader to have reading the book. Of course they are safe and dry and experiencing it at home, but I want them to have a sense of how it feels to be out on a run in that sort of situation – and sort of bring them along with that. Their child, desperately searching the wild forests and dangerous mountains of the Scottish Highlands, not knowing what’s out there. At its heart, Fray is a book about love and self-acceptance, while also taking the reader on a wild adventure through the Scottish Highlands.” A truly unique book, like nothing I've ever read before ... a thoughtful and beautifully written story, which is simultaneously gripping. This is a must-read.' ?????

Chris Carse Wilson running in Glen Coe Frame Focus Capture Photography And for you, it gives you that crucial space? A book by a keen runner who had long wanted to write about his mental health experiences but struggled to find a way to do so until he was caught in a mountainside storm will go on sale on Thursday. Their child, desperately searching the wild forests and dangerous mountains of the Scottish Highlands, not knowing what's out there. Breathing in enough to be given life, softening the pain a little, finding some colour in all the grinding grey. Remembering that something else was possible, that it could change. That was all I could hold on to, never daring to consider that it actually would change. That I would. He said: “My mental health challenges are inextricably linked to being autistic and how I experience the world, which for 40 years of my life I never understood. The diagnosis has been an incredible moment, although I’m still learning and coming to terms with it.The diagnosis has been an incredible moment, although I’m still learning and coming to terms with it. Fray is a book about family, love, and overcoming grief, set against the beauty and the threat of the Scottish Highland wilderness,” he says. Eerie and ethereal, Fray is an unsettling quest in the unforgiving Scottish highlands - utterly spellbinding' MARION TODD That combination of the wild, threatening weather and this abandoned building gave me the way into telling a story that is open and honest about mental health.” Their world contracts to the cottage and its surrounding mountains, glens and forests, and in Wilson’s hands the isolation is palpable and unremitting. It’s ironic that one can feel such claustrophobia in a novel dominated by the perilous grandeur of the great outdoors; but there are no secondary characters to break the spell, no respite from these compulsive trains of thought. Soon the protagonist is showing signs of mental exhaustion, tormented by their failings: their goal-orientated life, fear of failure, the unsought advice that has driven people away and soured relationships.

A truly unique book, like nothing I’ve ever read before … a thoughtful and beautifully written story, which is simultaneously gripping. This is a must-read.’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I know running can be hard at first and it's a big commitment. But I think if, if at any point in our lives, we introduce some running to it, that's going to make things better. You could be 13 or you could be 65, it doesn't matter when you choose to do it. There's a wonderful community waiting to welcome you to parkrun or to clubs or whatever it might be. It's just there for any of us to to embrace at any point if you're physically able to. And I just think it's just the best. Finally, I have to ask, is it true that you wrote your novel on the bus to work?

Inspiration

My understanding of it is that it is about a son experiencing guilt followed closely by depression, after losing his parents, because he realises that he never really knew them. In particular his father, who is senses is geographically close by, yet more distant than ever. What they find is an empty cottage, with the exception of thousands of scattered, cryptic notes left by the father. One of them says: “I am not gone. Mum is not gone. We are here. We are hidden.” 😱 Chris Carse Wilson began writing Fray in 2016 during a family trip to Glen Coe in the Scottish Highlands. Carse Wilson is a passionate advocate for mental health awareness who was diagnosed as autistic as an adult. He wrote Fray over several years in 15-minute bursts on the bus to and from work. Fray begins with its anonymous narrator arriving at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands. The narrator’s mother died some time ago, and shortly afterwards their father disappeared, apparently unable to accept what had happened. 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. The novel chronicles its narrator’s attempt to piece together these texts and, hopefully, find a clue to their father’s whereabouts.