Common Sense

She can see what everyone around her is feeling. She has never once looked at herself. In Stockholm, where winter arrives like a relative who has decided to stay, Kiara carries a secret she has never told a living soul. Around every person she passes there drifts a window of stained glass - coloured panes that shift with feeling, fog grey with doubt, and crack, very quietly, whenever someone lies. For thirteen years she has called it a gift and worn it like armour: the witness, the one who sees and is not seen. Then a public art commission asks her to make a work about everyone, and an old artist who has survived into wisdom tells her the one thing she cannot bear to hear - that she has spent her whole life reading other people's windows to avoid the only one she has never dared to look at. Her own. Across a single Swedish year - the deep dark of winter, the treacherous thaw, the cruel false spring, and the white nights when the sun refuses to set - Kiara discovers that the gift she was so proud of has been her most beautiful hiding place, and that the friends she felt quietly superior to have been trying, all along, to hand her own colour back to her. Witty, tender, and luminous, Common Sense is a novel about the certainty that blinds us exactly when we understand each other least - and about the small daily grace of turning to someone we love and asking, instead of knowing: why do you see it that way?

Pages: 193, Paperback, Independently published