What first appears to be a story of healing gradually becomes a search for the pattern hidden beneath a lifetime of experience.

The journey turns inward, leading me through Scotland and Cornwall in search of connections that were difficult to explain but impossible to ignore.

I travel by train to Mallaig in search of a lost soul part, to Killin to stand beside an ancient stone associated with Fingal and a distant ancestor, and to North Berwick to explore my maternal grandfather’s lineage.

At first, these journeys seem unrelated.

But a trail of clues begins to emerge, linking places, memories, relationships and ancestral stories into a pattern that had existed long before I recognised it.

Guided by a psychotherapist, a soul storyteller and a trance healer, I begin exploring a question that has quietly shaped my life:

What shaped me before I had words for it?

Told through a series of interconnected vignettes spanning ten weeks, Sin-eater follows the logic of an associative mind, where seemingly unrelated experiences gradually reveal a deeper coherence. The book explores the hidden relationship between personal history, family stories, trauma and the ways we learn to survive.

Originally written as a way of creating understanding for myself and my family, the memoir became something more: a record of what can happen when we follow unexpected clues with curiosity rather than certainty.

Sin-eater is the turning point in the five-book journey.

It is where the search for answers begins to reveal a much older story.