COLETTE a Cardiff story

Snow on the estates, the pubs full regardless. At six o'clock Colette Lawson did the tape. By half past seven she was still sitting on the edge of her bed in her coat, working out whether she could face the walk to the bus stop.She goes. In a snowbound pub in Canton she meets Peter Manley - twenty-one, from the same council estate in Ely, four minutes from her door. He takes her outside into the cold and asks to hear her story. Nobody has ever asked. People have talked about her, and around her, and over the top of her. Nobody has asked her.What follows costs them both more than either expects. Two families who have to decide something. A street that decided years ago. A job in London that neither of them can refuse or survive. A night in a Dublin Garda station. And one sentence, on a wet October morning inside a shop on St Mary Street, that neither of them says.Love turns out to be the easy part. Understanding takes longer, and some griefs are carried in silence for years before anybody gives them a name.A book about wanting an ordinary life - council houses and social clubs and Friday nights - and about two people who were both right, and lost each other anyway.For readers of Sarah Waters and Douglas Stuart.Contains depictions of transphobia, sexual assault, police custody and a non-consensual intimate examination.