nightsmith house press

When a sixteen-year-old abuse victim flees her childhood home with nothing more than the clothes on her back and a meagre collection of possessions, she thinks she is off to a difficult but better life. However, as the novelty of freely wandering London wears off, she begins to understand the danger she is in. In the subsequent hours, days, months, and years, her life is coloured with violence, loss, loneliness, and a feral hunger she struggles to break through.

Told over fifteen snapshots in time, she invites us into London’s rough sleeping underbelly, otherworldly yet hidden in plain sight. Grappling with fear, trauma, misplaced shame, and an aspiration for more than mere existence, she fights to return to society, experiencing both the best and worst of humanity in the process. Whilst we never learn her name, as we almost never learn the names of those on the streets, we do learn her story. Of how she learns what it is to be human when everything is stripped away, and the limitless value of the smallest pleasures.

The story is, at its heart, a novelisation of the author’s own experiences. In wanting to bring a new-found awareness to the issue of rough sleeping, the story is told with a brutal honesty and readers should be aware it contains depictions and themes of violence, sexual assault, death, suicidal ideation and generally distressing events.