Book Covers & Art Book Illustrations
Scarlet birthright: what they left behind
Set between Trinidad and New York from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, Scarlet Birthright traces the lasting consequences of one man's decision to leave. Joromi, a young DJ chasing opportunity abroad, believes distance will protect everyone involved. Instead, his absence shapes the lives of the women left behind, including a daughter he never claims.
Told through the intertwined perspectives of Joromi, Margaret, and Trisha, the novel examines how silence becomes inheritance, how love coexists with harm, and how reckoning arrives long after the moment of choice. The story moves from the social vibrancy of Trinidad's fetes to the restrained interiors of immigrant life in New York, capturing the emotional cost of migration, respectability, and deferred responsibility.
Both intimate and expansive, Scarlet Birthright explores family fracture without simplification and healing without easy resolution. It is a novel about legacy, accountability, and the courage required to interrupt what has been passed down.
growing up in sydney
In leafy, stale St Ives, 16-year-old Raffaele 'Rusty' Leonardi lives with his workaholic mother Fiona and neurotic stepfather Phil. Rusty spends most of his time at the prestigious Clarendon College and rarely sees his estranged father Vincenzo, who lives with his new wife and two young children in the same Inner West terrace that Vincenzo's father bought after emigrating from Italy in the 1960s.
Rusty is a strong, confident boy, whose starring role on Clarendon's rugby team has made him the top dog at his Hunters Hill campus. But Rusty has been weakened by unresolved emotional baggage his entire life, a weight he has just started to notice. This includes bearing Fiona's various mental breakdowns over her life, and fielding Phil's constant questioning about Fiona's previous marriage.
Rusty is unsure of his place with Vincenzo, whose family rejected him and his mother after they left Leichhardt for good. He feels no more certain in his mother's home, where her unhinged work routine is rapidly deteriorating her mental health.
A cataclysmic event catapults Rusty from his dreaded stupor and forces him into action. After retracing the steps of his childhood, and rekindling the memories and relationships he thought were lost forever, Rusty decides what sort of son, brother and person he wants to be.
Scarlet yearnings: beyond first glance collector’s edition
Scarlet Yearnings: Beyond First Glance is a genre-blending short story collection that explores what happens after attraction. Across twelve interconnected stories set in New York, Toronto, and Chicago, women from diverse cultures navigate second chances, fractured friendships, marriages under strain, and the private reckonings that follow desire.
Spanning Ghana, Trinidad, and North America, these character-driven narratives examine love as choice, effort, and maintenance rather than fantasy. A lifelong friendship unravels under silence. A marriage built on carefully guarded secrets begins to crack. A surgeon determined to move slowly toward love must confront the cost of vulnerability. In one story, a man wakes on the morning of his death. In another, a woman learns to see herself with tenderness for the first time.While the stories share a lineage with Scarlet Yearnings: Stories of Love and Desire, this collection stands entirely on its own.
Blending contemporary romance tropes with elements of speculative fiction and domestic suspense, Beyond First Glance offers emotionally grounded, discussion-worthy fiction for readers who value psychological depth and cultural specificity.