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Publication details

Title

The Reader and the Writer

Author

John Gill

Genre

Literary fiction

Published

11 November 2026, independently

Formats

Paperback and Kindle

Length

375 pages

Paperback ISBN

9798178921135

Kindle ASIN

B0HM5DWXJY

Where to buy

Amazon; signed copies from the author

Content note

Includes themes of suicide and self-harm, mental illness, and abuse.

About the book

In one sentence

Judith visits her mother in a psychiatric ward out of duty, guilt and a love long since curdled into endurance, until unsigned letters begin arriving: the unravelling confession of a man she tells herself she doesn’t know.

Short description

About 150 words

Judith visits her mother in the psychiatric ward the way other people visit graves: out of duty, out of guilt, out of a love that curdled long ago into something closer to endurance.

Then the letters begin arriving. Unsigned. Correctly addressed. Written in a hand she doesn’t recognise, they are the unravelling confession of a man who has left everything behind for a life he can’t quite believe in. Judith tells herself she doesn’t know who he is. She isn’t sure that’s true.

As her mother’s past surfaces in fragments too dark to have stayed buried this long, Judith is forced to reckon with what she’s capable of believing about her family, about the writer, and about herself.

The Reader and the Writer is a quiet, unflinching novel about inheritance, self-deception, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive the ones we’re given.

About the author

Short biography

About 100 words

John Gill is a street and documentary photographer from Castleford, West Yorkshire. He gives illustrated talks to camera clubs across the UK, mentors photographers and judges competitions. His photography books include Retro; After the Coal Dust, a documentary of the Yorkshire mining industry made with Bridget Gill; and ONE, TWO and 100 Faces, published by Progressive Publishing House.

The Reader and the Writer is his first novel. He wrote it by hand in the early 2000s, while working in finance in an industry everyone knew was dying, and put it away when publishers turned it down. After a few edits, it is published in November 2026.

One line

John Gill is a documentary photographer from West Yorkshire; The Reader and the Writer is his first novel.

The story behind the book

Some starting points for an interview or feature.

• Written to escape an office. In the early 2000s John worked in finance in an industry that everyone knew was dying, preparing five-year plans that were rejected and replaced with made-up figures. Sharing an office with a colleague who did that work in silence, he decided that if he had to spend his days making things up, they might as well be his own. The result was more than 100,000 words.
• “Too depressing for the mass market.” That was one publisher’s verdict. The book was never written to be commercial, and it was put away when the industry closed. It is being published now on its own terms, with that seriousness intact.
• A photographer’s novel. Like his documentary photography, the book doesn’t set out to provide answers. It asks questions about people and leaves the interpretation to the reader.
• Written by hand. The manuscript was written longhand and typed up in the DOS version of WordPerfect. No part of the book is AI-generated.

Images and files

Click an image to download it.

• Book coverJPEG, 800 × 1280
• The paperbackJPEG, 1164 × 1600
• Author photoJPEG, 1600 × 2039
• The original manuscriptJPEG, 768 × 578

Also available: the reading group guide (PDF, 2 pages, contains spoilers), fourteen discussion questions for book clubs.

Need a larger file or a different format? Just ask.