The Drifter & A Moth

There are stories that comfort, and there are stories that unsettle. This is the latter.

The Drifter and a Moth began as the vision of Y.H. Sahota, a dear friend, a restless mind, and a writer who understood that the shadows we carry are often more real than the light we chase. When cancer took him from us, he left behind not only unfinished chapters but also a challenge: to follow the thread of his imagination into the fog, and not to look away when the path grew dark.

This novel is not a puzzle to be solved, nor a tale of redemption. It is a descent into memory, into obsession, into the cold, ambiguous spaces where truth and delusion blur. Set against the bleak beauty of the Nordic landscape, it is a story of drifting souls: people who have lost their moorings, who search for meaning in the echo of trauma, and who sometimes find only the comfort of dread.

Y.H. Sahota wrote with a rare honesty. He believed that humour could be a weapon, that pain could be a compass, and that the most interesting characters are those who are broken in ways we recognise but rarely admit. His drafts were full of biting wit, sudden tenderness, and a refusal to offer easy answers. He left behind not just plot outlines but questions about guilt, about memory, about the cost of survival.

When I took up the task of finishing this novel, I did so with humility and fear. I was not just completing a manuscript; I was stepping into the mind of a friend who was no longer there to guide me. I found his notes in the margins, his jokes in the dialogue, his silences in the spaces between scenes. I tried to honour his voice, to preserve his sense of unease, and to let the story remain as unresolved as life itself.

This is not a book of heroes. There are no clean victories, no cathartic revelations. There are only fractured minds, dark laughter, and the quiet ache of truth. If you are looking for comfort, you will not find it here. If you are looking for answers, you may leave with more questions than you began.

But if you are willing to drift through fog, through memory, through the labyrinth of the self then you may find, as Y.H. did, that even in the darkest places, there is a strange and stubborn beauty.

This book is for those who have lost their way, and for those who have loved someone who could not be saved.