The Book I Was Afraid to Talk About

And Why I’ve Changed My Mind.

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I’ve often found with writing that what appears first as a problem – some issue with the plot, or a mistake I’ve made with a timeline – can become a strength, once recognised and properly addressed. It’s a theme that echoes through life more generally, albeit not a hard-and-fast rule. If I wanted, say, to win the 100 metres at the next Olympics, the fact that I’m approaching fifty and eat too many biscuits is not a set of issues I could easily turn to my advantage. Fortunately, I have other goals in life.

One of them, weirdly, revolves around my recent book: The Lake House Children.

It's been six months since I published it, and I’ve said very little about it—mostly because I saw its subject matter as a problem. Something so difficult to talk about, it would surely put off the very readers I hoped to attract. But maybe the rule above applies here? Maybe this terrible problem is actually a huge strength—just one I hadn’t seen until now?

That, at least, was the thinking behind me sitting down to write this. And if you read on, then you’ll get to judge if I’m right.

But first things first: what is The Lake House Children about? And what’s so challenging about it?

On the surface, it’s a family drama—a tale of three adult sisters, tied together by their shared ownership of a beautiful vacation house on the shores of a lake in the north-east of the United States. But there’s also a mystery, and perhaps a crime. The book begins with a terrible fire at the lake house, and the death of at least one person. But who died? Was it an accident? And if not, who set the blaze?

So far so good. So ordinary, really. Like most psychological thrillers, my stories are designed to entertain, to intrigue, and ultimately to deliver a satisfying conclusion. But with this book, I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to create something that would make readers think.

Hence the key to the mystery comes from something deeper. At the beginning of the book, the youngest sister, Kate, has a child, Jack. And as Jack grows and begins to speak, he seems to know things he cannot possibly know. He talks as if he has memories of a life before this one. It seems as though he has personally witnessed something that’s been kept secret in the family for years, poisoning it from the inside out – even though the events took place long before Jack’s birth.

And there’s the problem. You might already see it, but if not, let me spell it out: at its heart, this is a story about reincarnation. And that’s a topic most of us instinctively recoil from as too woo-woo, too out-there, to merit our precious attention.

Which raises two questions: Why did I write a book about it? And since I have, how can I encourage readers to give it a go?

But there’s also a third question, more subtle, but more interesting. Why is it we’re so quick to look away?

Because if you think about it, if there are children with memories of people who died before them, the implications are enormous. It would be the biggest discovery in the history of science. It would rewrite entire worldviews. Wipe out religions. It's hard to imagine anything that could be discovered that would be bigger.

So why aren’t we interested? Presumably because we assume it’s not true.

That was certainly my position before I began researching this book. I’d heard stories about kids who claimed these memories, and they were fun—in the way a magic trick is fun. I wanted to know the secret behind them, but I never thought these children were telling the literal truth. On that I trusted the scientists. The people who built the internet, and rockets, and microwave popcorn. If there was anything real to this, they’d be all over it, right?

So I assumed there were a host of rational explanations, perhaps difficult to appreciate up front, but which made sense when you understood them. And that’s why I thought this might be a good subject for a novel. As a novelist in this genre, I try to come up with seemingly impossible situations, which can only resolve after a sudden and dramatic twist. This felt like a seam worth mining.

So I did some research. I looked into the literature that supports reincarnation, and also into the more sceptical writing that claims to explain what’s really happening in these cases.

There’s lots of the former. Dr Ian Stevenson, for instance, was the head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Virginia. Over decades, he documented thousands of cases of children who claimed past-life memories. He found them in all cultures, and reported patterns: the memories start as the child learns to speak, fade by around six, and are almost always of someone who died violently or suddenly. The child with the memories tends to live near to where the previous person died – usually less than 50 miles, and they’ll usually be the same sex and have similar interests. Sometimes, the child even has a phobia linked to the way the previous person died. Going through a catalogue of hundreds of cases makes it all seem very real, very plausible.

But what did the sceptics say?

This was the moment when The Lake House Children changed from being just a story to being something a little deeper. Because the scientific explanations I expected to find weren’t really there. At least, not in the way I thought they’d be.

Sure, there are counter-arguments—the children who claim memories of living before are suffering false memories, parental influence. It’s all just a complex mesh of coincidence and cultural suggestion—but these explanations often felt half-hearted or dismissive. The response overall seemed to be a quiet, collective shrug of disinterest.

It’s hard to explain why, especially quickly. Trying to reach my own conclusion led me on a wild detour through neuroscience, philosophy, and quantum physics—none of which I’m remotely qualified to tell you about. But if there’s one idea that seems to underpin everything else, it’s this: The assumption that we are our brains. Our consciousness, our sense of being us, somehow comes from our physical brain. Once the brain goes, when we die, then so do we. It’s taken as a given that – if this is true – then woo-woo topics like reincarnation can’t be real. And thus we don’t need to look at them.

But are you your brain? Or do you ‘have’ a brain? Whatever that means. Where are “you” located, exactly? These are not questions with settled answers. So if we’re not sure about this, yet acting as if we are – and using this to dismiss children who claim to have lived before – there seems to be an identifiable problem there. So maybe it’s worth asking whether our disinterest is fully based on evidence, or partially on assumptions we’ve never really questioned?

But let’s take a step back. The Lake House Children is not a book that argues reincarnation is true. It simply takes the reality that such children do exist—and asks: what if that happened to you?

What if your child started saying things that couldn’t be real? Claiming to have another family, claiming to have died before and waking up screaming with the same nightmare, night after night? Would you believe them? Would you tell anyone? What would it do to your family? What would it do to you, and how you see the world?

That’s the real heart of the novel. And maybe, through that lens, it also opens the door to a bigger curiosity—a willingness to look again at something we’ve all tacitly agreed to ignore, without really examining why.

It’s also, I hope, still a suspenseful, twisty, emotional psychological thriller. That was my biggest fear when I finished it—that everything extra I’d tried to cram in might take away from the page-turning core. But six months on, with over a thousand reviews and an average of 4.5 out of 5, it seems to be OK on that front.

So there we go. I hope this goes some way to turning this book’s biggest problem into its greatest opportunity. And if it whetted your appetite, you can grab it from the links below. Thanks for reading—and for being curious.

If you enjoyed this, you might like the book too. Get it from the links below, on Amazon (free on Kindle Unlimited) or on audiobook.

Amazon Kindle or Kindle Unlimited

Audible

Apple Audiobook