Set in Yorkshire in the late 1980s, The Way the Day Breaks is a novel about family, love, memory and mental illness. 

They are a close-knit family: we see them around the dinner table and follow them on car-trips over the dales. They discuss nature, speculate on the future, dream up get-rich schemes, laugh, quarrel and try to hold together. 

But there is a darker current running beneath this life. Dad is changing: his schemes become wilder, his behaviour more unpredictable and life in the family becomes strained. His eventual breakdown has effects that resonate down the years.

 As formally inventive as it is narratively rich, the story through dialogue between the family and twenty years later, the poetic reflections of youngest son, Michael, as he tries to make sense of his father’s life and his own.

The Way the Day Breaks is a heartfelt, moving and brutally honest account of the effects of mental illness on all who are forced to live with it.