Tay South

Author with a passion for connecting, nerding out, fostering open dialogue, and telling stories with depth, meaning and digestible storylines with relatable characters.

WIP: The Way Back, a debut novel about a woman trying to face her past mistakes but is forced to face herself first.

the way back

After years of desperate avoiding, Josie McElvin finds herself at a crossroad. The dominoes have fallen, leaving the effects of her actions scattered at her feet like a forgotten soda can. The pinch in her chest tells her it might be about time to try to reckon with the mistakes of her youth. But after years of apathetic distance due to a haphazard coin tossed into a wishing well one fateful night, the ensuing flashbacks are enough to cripple her. The drowning feeling of grief and heartache floods back in and Josie isn't sure which way is up and which way is down.

Faced with a difficult road trip, the thin veil between her past and present blurs. The scenes in front of her look eerily similar to the ones that sent her running all those years ago, and every time that happens, she is thrusted into flashbacks that bring up emotions she had done well to pack away deep down. As she inches closer and closer to the town she fled, she is finally forced to come face-to-face with the moments and people that made her who she is. She thought she needed to reckon with the past, but now, she wrestles with her own identity and how maybe, just maybe, she got things just a little wrong.

The Way Back is a character-driven story that uses romantic and magical realism plots to analyze many themes: identity, grief, youthfulness, forgiveness, love and the passing of time.

Who are we, if not the things that we have done?

The Way Back is rich with character development, and my hope is that anyone who reads it will be able to connect with one of the versatile characters and see themselves in a part of the story. By the end of it, I hope it allows the reader to reconnect with a part of themselves, too.

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