A trilogy in three testimonies

The Light On

A man keeps every appointment in his life, and cannot say where he lives. His daughter keeps the count. Somebody has to keep the light on.

The Trilogy

Three books, three witnesses: his record, her reply, and the minutes of one last winter. Each can be read alone. They are better read together.

Cover of Where We Learn to Stay: a night sky over a block of flats with a single lit window. Book One

Where We Learn to Stay

The father’s testimony. Two lives, kept perfectly, told with equal tenderness — and a question the record refuses to answer: which one was real?

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Kindle out now · Paperback 28 August

Cover of Where We Learn to Leave: a night sky over a house, its front door open to a strip of gold light, a rucksack on the step. Book Two

Where We Learn to Leave

Some of us learn to leave. Evie learned to count. The reply to her father’s record — the testimony of the visited child.

Book Two — coming soon

Cover of Where We Learn to Arrive: the same house at night, door closed, one ground-floor window lit with a lamp standing in it. Book Three

Where We Learn to Arrive

One winter. A terms table, a notebook, and every gap in the record opened at last. The minutes of the end of an extraordinary ordinary life.

Book Three — to follow

The Keepers

A second trilogy, in development. The three women who read him: one stayed, one fought, one vanished. Their testimonies are coming.

The Keepers · One

The Rooms We Keep

Leah’s book. The testimony of the one who stayed, told room by room — a workshop, a kitchen, a gravel drive — and a question about its own pages that changes everything twice.

In development

The Keepers · Two

The Letters We Carry

Steph’s book. Fifty years of letters written and never sent — the war over a daughter’s Saturdays, told at last from inside the fortress.

In development

The Keepers · Three

The Rounds We Make

Hannah’s book. A nursing life, a quiet retirement close, and a death everyone calls natural. It doesn’t stay the kind of book it starts as.

In development

About the author

F. J. Winterbourne lives in England, keeps a family, and writes at the hours nobody is owed.

The Light On is their first work. The lights in these books are real.

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