Three Leaves (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798191941288)

Three leaves. Three seasons of a life coming apart-and becoming something new.

At nineteen, life is a nocturnal blur of cigarettes, unemployment, experimental music and sleepless nights in Newcastle. Hiding from the expectations of family and the ordinary world, a young outsider searches for escape through creativity, the strange new intimacy of the early internet, and an obsessive hunger for experience.

Then everything begins to change.

Love and lust collide with grief. Music offers freedom, but relationships become consuming and destructive. Buddhism, art, alcohol, sex and friendship each promise some kind of answer, while poverty, jealousy and existential despair threaten to swallow him whole.

Moving through the clubs, bedrooms, dole offices, rehearsal rooms and forgotten corners of early-2000s Britain, Three Leaves is an unfiltered coming-of-age story about creativity, obsession and the painful impermanence of everything we believe will last.

Darkly funny, brutally intimate and unsentimental, it asks what remains when the people and identities that once sustained us fall away-and whether losing them might also be how we grow.