The Fractured Times Trilogy

Can Cracks in the Past Ever Fully Mend?

The Fractured Times Trilogy is a haunting and intriguing speculative mystery series that traces the devastating consequences of a decades-old crime across the intersecting timelines of a father and son. Written with restrained, slow-burn intensity, the trilogy sustains a constant uncertainty: are its protagonists confronting a genuine supernatural phenomenon, or succumbing to the lingering effects of trauma.

The story unfolds across three interconnecting novels. New Year's Days follows a son through a winter marked by grief, discovery and inexplicable events. The Longest Days shifts perspective to the father, revisiting the defining tragedies of a distant summer. Finally, Where Does the Time Go? draws both narratives together within the quiet confines of a psychiatric hospital.

Cinematic in scope yet intimate in its exploration of character, the trilogy examines grief, memory, guilt and generational secrets, culminating in a profound search for redemption and an answer to the question at its heart: can the fractures of the past ever be reconciled with the fragile hope of the present?

Book One:

New Year's Days

Every New Year, Daniel Gordon stands at the threshold between memory and what lies ahead. It is a night shaped by ritual, by absence and by the quiet presence of the years he cannot return to.

Minutes after midnight, his father collapses: frightened, breathless, and holding a secret he never shared - his broken watch, forever frozen at the moment of his fall. In the emptiness following his death, Daniel is left with a cryptic message and a sense that something in his family's past has never been allowed to rest.

As the icy Scottish winter blows through the city, Daniel begins to feel the past pressing against him: old grief, unanswered questions, and the faint outline of a truth he has spent his life avoiding.

Then, without warning, the boundary between recollection and reality fractures.

Daniel finds himself back inside the New Year's Days he thought were lost forever - moving through parties, arguments, and family moments with a clarity that feels both impossible yet agonisingly real. At first, he can only observe. Then he realises, he may not be powerless.

Caught between the life he knows and the one he once lived, Daniel must discover what it means to confront his past, and what it might cost to change it.

Available to purchase from most global bookstores from 12 October 2026

Author Note on New Year's Days

I was delighted to receive early feedback from advance copy readers. It has been fascinating to learn how readily many embrace the literal time travel interpretation, while a different narrative is woven through the very same chapters. The journey of hope, that somehow solving a puzzle can deliver a redemptive reset of time is an uplifting experience, even though it might be emotionally devasting to travel alongside.

Whilst the clues are there to see, many readers naturally gravitate towards this more optimistic interpretation rather than the alternative: a tragic tale of a man whose already fragile mind finally fractures under the unbearable weight of grief; convincing himself that the realities created within his head can somehow reverse the past.

My ideal is for readers to experience both possibilities, and that might mean indulging this book twice. If readers experience only the time travel story on a first reading, my hope is that a second journey will allow them to observe Daniel as his mind painfully unravels before them.

With an appreciation of both narratives, readers may discover the broader philosophy I was trying to explore. These two paths are simply contrasting lenses through which to view the same inner struggle: our determination to heal from loss and and find peace. Human beings will go to the literal ends of the earth, or the deepest corners of their own minds, in pursuit of that goal.

Ultimately, New Year's Day is about - life, loss, love, aging, regret, missed opportunities and second chances. For readers who come to see both possibilities, and the deeper themes that connect them, they will have shared the experience I set out to create through this piece of modern storytelling.