J Banners writes about people caught between the lives they have made and the lives they might have lived. He follows footnotes further than he should.
Out now
Four books, out now on Amazon. A standalone, and a complete trilogy.
A novel
Milk. Light bulbs. Call Sarah.
Arthur Vale spent thirty-one years settling insurance claims. He always assumed that when he went, people would have kind things to say about him. They do, mostly. They just aren't saying them to him.
Complete trilogy
The oceans have been gone for three hundred years. What water is left is metered, taxed and sold back by the cup.
Book one
Everyone in the Rust-Gutter knows the story of a boy, a boat and a light across a sea that no longer exists. Nobody believes it. Then Calder learns the sea did not vanish. It was hidden.
Book two
Calder gave the world back its sea. Now it will not stop rising: a hand's width a month, quietly, in the night, and every road leads to the last dry country.
Book three
There is no shore left. There is only the Count. Four thousand people on a fleet of small hulls, and a system built to keep them alive that begins deciding who is worth keeping.
Coming
A new book every two months. Join The Register to hear the day each one lands.
28 JanNext out
Winifred Haigh is ninety-two and medically fit. She has been fit to go home for nearly two years. Every morning at six, before the lights, she takes the register of the women in Bay C, and every month there is someone new in the bed beside her.
March 2027
Four people. One name. Every Thursday for two years, Marta took her daughter to see an old woman who called her Caroline.
May 2027
Ossk was meant to watch one human for five years. Ossk kept watching for thirty-three. Now the Department has noticed.
July 2027
He bought everything on the list. Then one night he left the keys on the front tyre and walked into the trees.
September 2027
Your last sight passes to the next child born. Saja Lorne carries three glimpses of a murder she was never meant to see.
October 2027
Whoever chooses the minute a child is born chooses what it will carry for the rest of its life.
November 2027
A glimpse never crosses the sea. Not every child the Passage carries away arrives.
About
J Banners writes about people caught between the lives they have made and the lives they might have lived.
His books tend to start with a piece of paper somebody should have thrown away: a shopping list, a land register, a ward register taken at six in the morning, a birth card written down late, an assessment thirty-eight years overdue. He likes institutions, mostly for what they forget, and he follows footnotes further than he should.
He reads across literary fiction, crime, science fiction, dark fantasy, noir and memoir, and is as happy in a book written for twelve-year-olds as in one written for their grandparents. He keeps a list of the best last lines he has read, which he will not show anyone. Away from the page he cooks with more ambition than a weeknight strictly requires.
The Register
The real document behind a book, and one line about the next release. Nothing else, and never more than once a month.