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

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This is an exciting, intense book which explores the redemptive power of nature and the universal challenges we all face living with our own mental health. And now I use running very deliberately to manage anxiety. So for instance, at the moment I’m doing book events, which has been wonderful and very exciting. But one thing that I knew before I was doing that all this stuff is I have to run in the morning, before I go, as a way of managing my anxiety in advance. A book by a keen runner who had long wanted to write about his mental health experiences but struggled to find a way to do so until he was caught in a mountainside storm will go on sale on Thursday.

Fray is a book about family, love, and overcoming grief, set against the beauty and the threat of the Scottish Highland wilderness,” he says. 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 seriesWhat they find is an empty cottage, with the exception of thousands of scattered, cryptic notes left by the father. One of them says: “I am not gone. Mum is not gone. We are here. We are hidden.” 😱 Apparently written in 20-minute bursts on the bus to his job as Communications Manager of V&A Dundee, and hidden from his wife until it was completed, Chris Carse Wilson’s debut novel is an intense study of grief and obsession, following two people who try to come to terms with bereavement by pushing themselves mentally and physically to their limits. Some of the most familiar names included in the extensive, varied line-up of writers at Aye Write this year are Alistair Campbell, Ruby Wax, Val McDermid, Liz Lochhead, Janey Godley, Cameron McNeish, Josie Long in conversation with Frankie Boyle, Robin Ince, Aasmah Mir, Chris Brookmyre, Darren McGarvey, Polly Toynbee, and Sally Magnusson.

Fray is set in the remote wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, and follows a nameless narrator as they desperately search for their missing father. Instead, they discover an abandoned cottage filled with thousands of confusing, terrifying scraps of paper, detailing the father’s frenzied attempts to find his dead wife. 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 More than 120 events will showcase a broad range of both established and emerging writing talent. These will feature lively discussion and debate involving 175 authors from Scotland and around the world. Fray can be seen as an active process of working through its narrator’s deep feelings – and there’s cause to wonder how much of what’s narrated is happening in the external world, and how much in the narrator’s mind. Then again, for this narrator, there may not need be much difference. Whatever your interpretation, the experience of Fray’s narrator is vivid in Carse Wilson’s telling.

The author said: “My mental health challenges are inextricably linked to being autistic and how I experience the world, which for 40 years of my life I never understood. Author Chris Carse Wilson, whose book Fray goes on sale on Thursday (Jane Barlow/PA) Aye Write is produced by Glasgow Life, the charity which delivers culture and sport to enhance mental, physical and economic wellbeing, and is funded by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland. 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. 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.