Darlene by Phillip Michael Shirley is a literary noir novella examining desire, psychiatric authority, and the quiet violence of treatment. Spare, unsettling, and morally unflinching, Darlene follows a woman recently released from psychiatric hospital as she revisits the figures who once defined her — and begins to understand how narratives are authored, erased, and inherited. Q: Where did Darlene begin for you? I always start with the beginning. That sounds obvious, but I don’t begin with a plan. My novels are largely unplanned. Their climaxes are rarely climactic. They tend to hang, unresolved — much like life itself. I’m never entirely certain of where a story is going, and I’ve come to accept that as part of the process rather than a failure of it. Q: You’ve said your work resists resolution. Why is that important to you? We’re often told that a novel should move toward an ending, that it should resolve itself in a satisfying way. I don’t recognise that. We may know that life ends, but we don’t know how or when. Why should fiction pretend otherwise? Q: Your work often seems to sit between reality and something more abstract. Is that deliberate? I tend to blur the line between reality and fantasy, yes. A critic once asked whether my last novel, The Rivers That Run Through Us, was “full of symbolism.” I resisted that idea. It’s not symbolism in any deliberate sense. It’s people — often damaged, often unstable — moving along a very narrow line between what we call sanity and what we fear lies beyond it. Q: Your writing has been described as unusual, even erratic. Do you recognise that? I’ve been described as elusive, strange, and often erratic. That may be fair. I’ve experienced extremes — breakdowns and moments of clarity, poverty and comparative comfort — and I suspect those things find their way into the work. There’s a fine line between coherence and collapse. I’ve always been interested in that line. Q: How would you describe your style? Another critic described my prose as elegant and my narrative compelling. I would say I’ve found my style in a kind of stylised carelessness — allowing the work to breathe without over-determining it. I’m not a conventional novelist, and I’ve never tried to be one. Q: You came to fiction relatively late. Did that shape the work? Yes. In fiction terms I’m a late arrival. I started writing at eighteen as a journalist and worked across a wide range of publications, but I didn’t publish a novel until much later. By then, whatever voice I had was already formed — or perhaps fractured — by experience. Q: You’ve spoken before about difficult periods in your life. Did those influence Darlene? I came to fiction, in part, through a period of personal collapse — a self-medicated breakdown, if one were to be precise. It wasn’t something I set out to use, but it became foundational. Not in terms of content, but in how I look at things. How I approach what doesn’t easily make sense. Q: What kind of book is Darlene? It’s not a conventional narrative. It doesn’t offer resolution. It observes rather than concludes. It places a character within systems — medical, institutional, relational — that attempt to define her, and then quietly exposes the limits of those definitions. Q: What interests you most in that space? Proximity. How close we can come to understanding something without reducing it. I’m not interested in simplifying the darker aspects of human experience. Nor in redeeming them. Just in looking at them directly. Q: What should readers expect from the novel? I don’t think in those terms, really. I would only say that I’m not simple, and neither are my novels. Darlene doesn’t attempt to resolve that. In this outstanding novella we get a sense of how the author’s former work had rattled the composure of publishing professionals. I suggest ultimately to their loss. Readers themselves deserve the choice to be uneasy. From disturbance and disruption of equilibrium more complex and interesting concepts emerge. Darlene will be published this summer by Foreshore Books, an imprint of Foreshore Publishing. The novella features a foreword by acclaimed author and Professor of Psychology, Paula Nicolson. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Phillip Michael Shirley was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1965 and lives in London. His work migrates between narrative urgency and a stark, often elemental sense of place and human consequence. Early in his career he was a journalist; later he became an author with HarperCollins. His first book, Miracles Can Happen, was published in 1996, but it was The Soul of Boxing – longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year – which definitively established his reputation in 1999. His other nonfiction work includes Blood and Thunder: The Unofficial Biography of Jonah Lomu, Deadly Obsessions: Life and Death in Formula One and the widely acclaimed Where Is The Winning Post, the biography of Mikie Heaton-Ellis. In fiction he has explored mythic and unsettling terrain: The Rivers That Run Through Us has been described as sometimes surreal, starkly violent and astonishing in its narrative force, earning strong reader praise for its vivid and unflinching vision.
“Kiwi took over — I simply followed.” Roger Emms’ controversial, fearless and unsettling novel About Your Daughter. Interview by Phil M. Shirley It was a mild, perfectly typical autumn afternoon when I met Roger Emms in the crowded Waterstones café on Gower Street, a short walk from his London home. The pavements were damp from a brief, forgettable shower; students drifted in and out with tote bags and half-formed essays; and the low hum of people sheltering among books created its own warmth. Briefly back from Grenada, Roger settled easily into a corner table—composed, observant, with the quiet intelligence of someone who has spent a lifetime watching people. He speaks the way he writes: measured, unhurried, uninterested in superficialities. His debut novel, About Your Daughter, is as fearless and unsettling as the mind behind it. For thirty years, Roger has lived in the Caribbean, a place that quietly permeates his work. Before turning to fiction, he led a substantial professional life: founding a London-based healthcare research and consultancy organisation working across Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS policy, and other conversations governments often struggle to have. He has also worked in a children’s psychiatric hospital and supported a home for abused children. It is the kind of CV that could sound pious or self-important in the wrong hands. Roger does not perform gravitas; he states facts, then moves on. About Your Daughter did not begin as a novel intending to provoke. It began, he tells me, with a tree. “I started with the silk cotton tree I know well,” he says. “A real tree, overlooking the harbour where the slave yards were. I imagined a girl—Kiwi—talking to it, consulting its age and wisdom. That was the story.” He pauses, amused. “Then Kiwi took over. And I let her.” What followed is a daring work of literary fiction that inhabits the inner life of a pre-teen girl on a Caribbean island—her imagination, private desires, confusions, fantasies, vulnerabilities, and power. The silk cotton tree becomes her confidante, a gateway to a more complicated understanding of herself. Roger enters territory most writers avoid altogether, or approach only from a safe adult distance. He refuses both. Kiwi’s story, he explains, grew from three preoccupations rooted in his long-standing interest in child psychology and the blind spots of adulthood. “There’s this idea,” he says, “that parents understand their young daughters—or even want to. But they often know very little about what’s actually happening in their children’s emotional or imaginative lives. Sexual development frightens people. They close the door on it and pretend the child has closed the door too.” In About Your Daughter, Kiwi’s world becomes a site of collision: innocence and agency, fantasy and danger, curiosity and transgression. Roger avoids didacticism, offering no warnings, lessons, or endorsements. Instead, he attempts something bolder and harder—an act of attention. He tries to understand a young girl’s consciousness from the inside. “In literature,” he says, “young girls are often narrated by adults who want something from them. Or they’re moralised into symbols. What interested me was: what if Kiwi told her own story? What if we listened to her voice without cleaning it up?” Nabokov inevitably comes up—not as a model to imitate, but as a literary problem to answer. “Dolores Haze didn’t get to tell her own story,” Roger says. “We only heard Humbert Humbert’s version. I wanted to imagine the girl who does get to speak, unfiltered. What would she insist on? What would she hide? What would she misunderstand? What would she exploit?” Kiwi is portrayed not through an adult gaze of scandal or titillation, but through the shifting perceptions of a child trying to map unfamiliar impulses onto a world that offers her almost no guidance. She is naïve and knowing, vulnerable and manipulative, tender and—at times—cruel: contradictory in the way real children are, though adults rarely admit it. “She fascinates me,” Roger says, “not because she’s a symbol, but because she’s a child trying to make sense of adult behaviour she doesn’t yet have the tools to interpret.” The novel also confronts the blindness of adults—their desire not to know. Kiwi’s parents, and the parents of her friends, move through the book with a touching and dangerous obliviousness. “Intergenerational silence,” Roger calls it. “We pretend not to see what we fear. But that doesn’t mean the child isn’t thinking—or acting.” This uneasy mixture of misunderstanding and power is one of the novel’s most unsettling elements. Roger describes it calmly, without melodrama. “The stereotype is the older man exploiting the young girl,” he says. “But that isn’t the whole story. Children can be exploitative too—not because they’re wicked, but because they’re inexperienced, impulsive, emotionally uneven, and sometimes more powerful than they realise.” About Your Daughter does not ask the reader to approve of anything. It asks only that they stay in the room—to resist flinching away from the discomfort of childhood interiority. Was it difficult to write? “I didn’t think it would be publishable,” he says with a small shrug. “I was writing it for myself. And for Kiwi.” Most major UK literary agencies turned it down, which he took as a promising sign. “Algorithms,” he says, with a grim smile. “They like the predictable. Kiwi’s mother says the industry is full of sharks and cannibals. She was probably right—though she didn’t know about the robots.” Foreshore Publishing, he adds, was the first publisher to read the manuscript as literature rather than a problem. “I wanted an independent publisher who wasn’t terrified of a difficult book,” he says, “who understood what it was actually doing.” He looks around the packed café and smiles. “People underestimate readers. They underestimate what fiction can hold. Kiwi’s story isn’t written to shock—it’s written to make you think differently about what children know, and what they hide.” When our conversation ends, the café has grown louder, the light outside beginning to fade. Roger buttons his coat, thanks me politely, and
From the director known for work on The Avengers (1998), Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), and The Batman (2022). Foreshore Books Announces The Green Man, a New Supernatural Horror Thriller by Mark Woollard — Coming Autumn 2026. Foreshore Books, the small-press imprint of Foreshore Publishing, is excited to announce the upcoming release of The Green Man, a chilling new supernatural thriller that draws on one of Britain’s oldest and most intriguing myths. Set in the deep forests of southern England, The Green Man follows John Turner, an ex-soldier seeking quiet work and recovery far from his past. But when a series of disturbing incidents begins near an ancient Iron Age site, Turner finds himself pulled into a mystery that unsettles both locals and investigators. As old symbols, forgotten histories, and buried emotions resurface, Turner discovers that the forest holds far more than legends — and that the past, both personal and ancient, is not as distant as it seems. The story unfolds with creeping dread, blending psychological tension with mythological mystery as Turner is drawn into events he cannot ignore. Joined by journalist Lowry Warner and historical theologian Peter Howell, he must confront forces that defy explanation and a darkness that seems to wake with every step deeper into the woods. Phil M. Shirley, Publisher at Foreshore Books, said: “The Green Man is a gripping, atmospheric thriller — a modern story woven through with ancient echoes. Mark Woollard brings a cinematic depth to the page that horror and mystery readers will love.” About the Author Mark Woollard is a British writer and director with a forty-year career in film and television. He has contributed to many major franchises, including Harry Potter, Star Wars, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, as well as the Marvel universe — and even a James Bond film. Woollard was mentored by the late legendary producer Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds, Space: 1999), with whom he developed television projects and co-wrote Anderson’s final feature-film script. He is currently directing an animated feature scheduled for release in 2027. The Green Man will be published by Foreshore Books in Autumn 2026.
