Sam in Pieces

Sam Cooper has a plan. Wake up. Take his pills. Write in his journal. Keep everyone exactly three meters away. After years of addiction, loss, and a past he's still learning the shape of, the plan is the only thing between him and the bottom. Paris is manageable. Paris is quiet. Paris is his.

Then a woman with a mess of brown curls jumps on a bench in a corner of the city and plays like music is breathing, and Sam's plan starts to crack.

Sam in Pieces is a novel about the long, non-linear work of recovery and what happens when you're finally brave enough to let people in before you're ready. Told through Sam's precise, guarded, deeply interior voice, it follows three musicians as they fall into each other's orbits across Paris, New York, London, and Sydney, building something neither of them has a name for yet.

It is a love story. It is also a story about the things we carry from the people who were supposed to protect us. About the versions of ourselves we grieve. About the difference between surviving and choosing to stay.