Blue Eyes and the Stones Coming 6 October 2026

Exciting News!

My latest book, Blue Eyes and the Stones, will be available on 6 October. I walked alongside this grumpy cat for 15 years. We loved and annoyed each other, and for nine of those years, I wrote stories from her point of view.

In the book, Blue Eyes is a Balinese-spirited cat leading a double life: the cat who visits Lucy’s door for food, and also Bastet, who listens to the plant devas and remembers the old legends her mother told her.

It’s set on a hill near Tavira, Monte Agudo in fact, where olive groves meet thirsty new orange farms and water is running out. Blue Eyes frets about what’s happening to her home: disappearing trees, poisoned land, and hunters’ dogs closing in on her colony.

Guided by Ceres of Old, a grieving wild boar, a friendly hare, and a night where owls watch, Blue Eyes follows a tunnel beneath her own hill into a Portugal few humans ever see: one of shape-shifting mythical guardians, forgotten goddesses, and sacred stones waiting to be found again.

But the further she travels from home, the more she understands that what she’s looking for was never buried in the old stones at all. It was waiting in everything she’d learned to stop noticing.

Blue Eyes and the Stones is a tale of grief, memory, and the quiet, unglamorous and sometimes painful work of tending what’s ours, a reminder that nothing is ever fixed all at once, but a beginning is enough.

Watch the book trailer below or on YouTube

Purchase the book on Amazon

Purchase the book on Amazon and make an independent writer and publisher very happy. I hope you enjoy the story and love Blue Eyes as she deserves.

The novella explores:

Portuguese folklore and setting: real places, real landscapes, real threats

Environmental themes: drought, flood, habitat loss, and what gets lost when we are not looking

A cat’s-eye narrator: secretive, wry, and more perceptive than anyone around her realises

A blend of magical realism, divine feminine, myth, and quest, without a tidy, all-is-solved ending

Wisdom as something carried and passed on, not something won or retrieved

Books with similar themes

Nonfiction kindred spirit:

Listen to the Land Speak by Manchán Magan: a nonfiction journey through Irish holy wells, ogham stones, and half-forgotten place names, arguing that land holds ancestral memory the way water holds shape. Where Magan writes essays, Blue Eyes and the Stones uses the same argument through a cat’s eyes. Stones, wells, and hills become living repositories of memory, not inert scenery, and an older, more feminine relationship to land waits to be remembered rather than invented.

Animal-centred fantasy:

Watership Down by Richard Adams: a group of rabbits leave home and build a new community, facing real danger along the way. Like Blue Eyes, its animals carry their own culture, mythology, and grief.

The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann: displaced animals cooperate to find sanctuary, with a strong thread of environmentalism running underneath.

Environmental themes:

The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin: the clash between settlers and a forested world’s native inhabitants, and what’s lost when land isn’t respected.

Quest and prophecy:

The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper: children drawn into an old battle between light and dark, steeped in myth, prophecy, and the power of place.

Magical realism:

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel: magic folded into the everyday, set against family, tradition, and a changing land.