Back in the early 2000s I worked in finance in a dying industry. Everyone knew, but no one would admit that it was dying. So, the 5-year plans I helped prepare were rejected and replaced with new ones based on made-up figures. A pointless exercise all round.
Making stuff up took little effort. Not that the powers that be thought so, and my office became a shared space with someone who perhaps was prepared to put more effort into making fabricated figures look viable. There was little to do; what I could do myself in a few hours a day now became a two-man job. Or it would have been if I hadn’t bailed out and let him do it all. Perhaps he was ambitious, and I just felt we were all wasting our time.
So he would studiously sit in his collar and tie at the computer, making lies look real. So dedicated was he to this task that we hardly spoke. He eventually got the nickname ‘Charisma’. Not sure what mine was, probably ‘lazy git’.
His arrival did free up some time for me, though. Sitting in an office with ‘Charisma’ was on the deathly side of boring. I needed something to do.
If I had to spend my days making things up, they might as well be my own. So I wrote a book. Over 100,000 words of it.
A few people read it and seemed to like it. A couple of publishers, not so much. Maybe there was just no money in it for them. One of them decided it was “too depressing for the mass market.” It was never intended to be commercial; it was really just created as an escape from ‘Charisma’.
Eventually the industry died, and the book was put away. Until now.
After a few edits, it is now going to see the light of day.
The Reader and the Writer will be available from 11th November 2026, in paperback and Kindle. It is probably still “too depressing for the mass market.”
About the book
The Reader and the Writer follows Judith, who 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. It’s a quiet, unflinching novel about inheritance, self-deception and the stories we tell ourselves to survive the ones we’re given.
Content note: includes themes of suicide and self-harm, mental illness, and abuse.
Published 11th November 2026 in paperback and for Kindle. Signed copies are available direct from me – email to reserve one.
More about the book, including a reading group guide, at johndavidgill.com.
