Their child, desperately searching the wild forests and dangerous mountains of the Scottish Highlands, not knowing what's out there.

Fray is an exceptional and haunting debut, very reminiscent of the work of Max Porter ... I absolutely loved it. Chris Carse Wilson is a highly talented writer and Fray is filled with passages that resonated deeply with me' ????? Chris Carse Wilson began writing Fray in 2016 during a family trip to Glen Coe in the Scottish Highlands. So I guess running is for you both a tool for managing mental health but, in a way, it’s also a metaphor for it?Foregrounding atmosphere and psychological suspense for most of its length, Fray is a literary novel that probes the most sensitive recesses of its characters’ minds in a build-up to a charged and hallucinatory final act. An eerie and immersive depiction of the difficult process of grieving, it marks the emergence of a powerful new writer.

Eerie and ethereal, Fray is an unsettling quest in the unforgiving Scottish highlands – utterly spellbinding’ MARION TODD Fray is a book about family, love, and overcoming grief, set against the beauty and the threat of the Scottish Highland wilderness,” he says.Absolutely, and I think also without really realising it until I was older. The times of my life when I’m running, I'm happier and healthier, suffer fewer mental health problems. I'm more in control of everything. Life is just better, full stop. And at times where I'm not running because of illness or injury or just a moment where I've sort of fallen out of love with it, things are worse, you know, on a very simple basic level. Running makes every day better. It makes your life better. And much easier to control. Carse Wilson is a passionate advocate for mental health awareness who was diagnosed as autistic as an adult. He wrote Fray over several years in 15-minute bursts on the bus to and from work. Carse writes the narrator as being uncomfortable, inexperienced and unknowledgable about the wilds of the Highlands. Its either that, which I prefer to believe, or Carse himself is. To the narrator, the mountains are threatening rather than alluring. He mistakenly states that he is in a place no mountaineers tred, as there are no such places.

An abandoned cottage in the remote wilderness, filled with thousands of confusing, terrifying handwritten notes. He 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. The diagnosis has been an incredible moment, although I’m still learning and coming to terms with it.Fray begins with its anonymous narrator arriving at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands. The narrator’s mother died some time ago, and shortly afterwards their father disappeared, apparently unable to accept what had happened. The narrator has now traced their father to this cottage – he’s not there himself, but the place is full of papers and maps written and drawn by his hand. The novel chronicles its narrator’s attempt to piece together these texts and, hopefully, find a clue to their father’s whereabouts. HarperNorth has pre-empted the “spine-tingling” début novel by Chris Carse Wilson, communications manager at V&A Dundee. What 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.” 😱 Fray is an exceptional and haunting debut, very reminiscent of the work of Max Porter … I absolutely loved it. Chris Carse Wilson is a highly talented writer and Fray is filled with passages that resonated deeply with me’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Yes, my parents were both runners, they got into it because of the Great North Run, and I sort of followed on. I ran as a kid, joined a club, and did cross country and athletics through my teenage years. I was an 800m runner and I loved it. It’s so fascinating because it’s almost impossible to get it right. I always think an 800m race feels like a great idea until about 500m, then you are hanging on for dear life. I was a decent club runner but nothing out of the ordinary, but I loved it and with a few breaks I’ve continued ever since.

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. 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.Breathing in enough to be given life, softening the pain a little, finding some colour in all the grinding grey. Remembering that something else was possible, that it could change. That was all I could hold on to, never daring to consider that it actually would change. That I would. The narrator is driven to their wit’s end trying to puzzle all this out. Along the way, they talk about the darkness that has clouded their life at times, and the ways they’ve tried to cope. Running is one thing that helped, a way to keep moving, to hang on: I’m not sure what this book wanted to be. A character analysis of the narrator? If so, it leads to zero conclusions and is simply boring. A written equivalent of a David Lynch movie? If so, one bizarre scene at the end does not a David Lynch movie make.