How I die

There was a girl Leo saw twice and never spoke to.

At sixteen, Leo is good at being liked. He is loud in the right rooms, quick with a joke, the friend who fills every silence - and quietly certain that none of it reaches the part of him that actually wants things. He has two friends who see him, a father he cannot bring himself to answer, and a window that something taps on every night at half past three.

Then, one ordinary evening, on the long walk home from a library two streets from his house, everything changes.

How I Die is the story of the life that was waiting on the other side of one small act of courage Leo could not find. It moves through first love and first heartbreak, through the slow erosion of a young man who becomes someone he never meant to be, through the work that hollows him and the lies that keep him upright and toward a morning that asks the only question that ever mattered. Not how a person dies. How he lived. And what, in the end, is left of him.

Told in spare, unflinching prose and threaded with small fables that read like half-remembered dreams, this is a novel about the distance between who you are and who you promised you would become and the cost of waiting too long to close it.

For readers of quiet, devastating fiction about ordinary lives and the moments that turn them.

"In the end it is not about how I die. It is about how I lived, and the pieces of me that made it through."