Author’s note
I have spent most of my working life in security, which means I have spent it around the question of what an insider can do. It is a category we discuss in controls and monitoring and separation of duties, and almost never in terms of the person, who in every case I have encountered was somebody’s colleague and somebody’s husband and entirely unremarkable until the week they were not.
The technical premise of this novel is not the interesting part, and I have deliberately not made it the interesting part. A water treatment system with insufficient segregation and a trusted engineer is not a hard problem to construct on paper; the industry has been writing that risk down for twenty years. What I could not stop thinking about was the sixteen years before it. The breakfasts. The bedroom he moved out of. The weekends in the caravan that nobody asked about because there was nothing to ask.
So the book is not about how he did it. It is about a marriage that had already ended without either party saying so, and what it costs to look back through a life you thought you understood and find that the evidence was all present and simply never assembled. Sarah is not slow, and the novel is careful about that. She is doing what everyone does, which is assuming that the person across the table is who they were yesterday.
Bristol was not incidental. I live near it, I have walked the gorge and stood on the bridge more times than I can count, and I wanted the contamination to move through somewhere I could see rather than an invented city. There is a particular cruelty in Christmas Day for this, which I will not pretend was accidental.
People will ask whether it could happen. I would rather they asked the other question, which is how long you could live beside someone planning it.
Ten questions
- Sarah says she was waiting without permitting herself to name what she was waiting for. What does the novel suggest she already knew, and when?
- Andrew is described as a quiet man, a grieving father, a husband who had moved into the back bedroom. How far does the novel let us understand him, and where does it deliberately stop?
- The book is called Adjacent. Who is adjacent to whom, and does that change as the year goes on?
- The inquiry occupies a great deal of the novel. What is it actually for — the characters, the country, or the reader?
- Ninety-four people die, and the novel spends most of its length on one marriage. Is that a moral choice by the author, or an evasion?
- How does the novel handle the technical detail of what Andrew did? What is the effect of what it chooses not to explain?
- Sarah is repeatedly asked how she did not know. What does the novel think of that question?
- The caravan recurs. What does it come to stand for?
- Is Sarah’s reckoning at the end a resolution, a refusal, or something else?
- The novel is set in a real city, in a specific week. Would it work anywhere else?
Reading groups are welcome to reproduce these. If your group is discussing the book and would like me to join for half an hour by video, ask — I generally say yes.
Publication is September 2026.
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