Fray: The haunting and mysterious new literary suspense novel of 2023, for fans of bestsellers THE LONEY and PINE

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He had long wanted to write about his own mental health experiences but had always struggled to find a way to do this. The key moment came during a mountain run in a storm. Carse Wilson is a passionate advocate for mental health awareness who was diagnosed as autistic as an adult. He wrote Fray over several years in 15-minute bursts on the bus to and from work.

My understanding of it is that it is about a son experiencing guilt followed closely by depression, after losing his parents, because he realises that he never really knew them. In particular his father, who is senses is geographically close by, yet more distant than ever. This book is advertised as “a missing person mystery like no other.” No. No, it’s not. Stop lying. READBAIT!!! 😡 Fray is a totally original novel and I loved it for that… A dangerous journey that throws up lots of surprises. The writing is awe-inspiring.’ - Alex Pine, bestselling author of the DI James Walker series Fray begins with its anonymous narrator arriving at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands. The narrator’s mother died some time ago, and shortly afterwards their father disappeared, apparently unable to accept what had happened. The narrator has now traced their father to this cottage – he’s not there himself, but the place is full of papers and maps written and drawn by his hand. The novel chronicles its narrator’s attempt to piece together these texts and, hopefully, find a clue to their father’s whereabouts.He said: “ Fray is a book about family, love and overcoming grief, set against the beauty and the threat of the Scottish Highland wilderness. I’ve always written in secret, even hiding this book from my wife until it was finished, and I’m thrilled to now be working with the amazing HarperNorth team to bring this gripping story to the world. The narrator is driven to their wit’s end trying to puzzle all this out. Along the way, they talk about the darkness that has clouded their life at times, and the ways they’ve tried to cope. Running is one thing that helped, a way to keep moving, to hang on:

Aye Write will also look ahead to exciting debut talent in its ‘Ones To Watch’ events. These will shine the spotlight on writers including Ryan Love, Lynsey May, Denise Saul, Mark Pajak, Chris Carse Wilson, and Wiz Wharton. Glasgow Life Chair, Bailie Annette Christie, said: “Aye Write is always a much-anticipated highlight in the city’s cultural calendar. This year’s festival will bring together a wonderful array of home-grown and international writing talent for a series of dynamic discussions and activities, so audiences from Glasgow and further afield can look forward to a superb celebration of writing and books and a really memorable event.” An unnamed narrator arrives at an isolated cottage in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands, tracing the last known movements of his father, not long after the death of his mother.Chris Carse Wilson began writing Fray in 2016 and kept it secret from everyone including his wife Elaine, 42, until it was finished.

I'd been wrestling with how to honestly write about mental health and that moment of feeling so helpless and vulnerable against the landscape, against the weather – that was the spark. I knew this was my setting. This intensity that I'm feeling in this moment of panic trying to get down off the side of the mountain safely, is the same experience that I want a reader to have reading the book. Of course they are safe and dry and experiencing it at home, but I want them to have a sense of how it feels to be out on a run in that sort of situation – and sort of bring them along with that. So I guess running is for you both a tool for managing mental health but, in a way, it’s also a metaphor for it? My running and writing kind of have always existed in parallel to each other. I've been running for 30 years, I've been writing for 30 years. And I've always used both of them in different but complementary ways to manage my mental health – to manage challenges that I have with anxiety, all of which is linked to being autistic, which is not something I knew about until a year or two ago. You've said that being out in nature, running outside, is very important to you

Their world contracts to the cottage and its surrounding mountains, glens and forests, and in Wilson’s hands the isolation is palpable and unremitting. It’s ironic that one can feel such claustrophobia in a novel dominated by the perilous grandeur of the great outdoors; but there are no secondary characters to break the spell, no respite from these compulsive trains of thought. Soon the protagonist is showing signs of mental exhaustion, tormented by their failings: their goal-orientated life, fear of failure, the unsought advice that has driven people away and soured relationships.