Kit de Waal Books in Order

When social workers separate Leon from his baby half-brother, he cannot understand why the younger, white child is easier to place. Determined to reunite them, he navigates foster care, new friendships and adult decisions while holding tightly to their bond.

An interracial couple faces the pressures of racism and the need to conceal their relationship in Smethwick. Set around local pub protests and Malcolm X's 1965 visit, de Waal's story connects private love with a community's struggle against segregation.

On his twenty-first birthday, unusually tall Timothy accepts a day’s work from builder Charlie. What begins as an exciting first opportunity becomes unpredictable when they must collect money from a local thug, changing the course of Timothy’s carefully familiar day.

Mona makes dolls in a seaside town while quietly carrying memories of her Irish childhood, young marriage and devastating loss. As she seeks happiness later in life, her work and relationships reveal how the past can endure within the present.

Seventeen-year-old Dinah leaves the commune where she grew up, determined to create a new identity. Instead of traveling alone, she drives a campervan for a one-legged man whose mission forces her to confront the experiences she hoped to escape.

These stories bring overlooked people into focus at turning points in ordinary lives. Departures, weddings, family reunions and difficult memories expose the quiet pressures of love and loss, revealing unexpected tenderness alongside the disappointments people carry.

Kit de Waal recalls a Birmingham childhood shaped by Irish, Caribbean and British influences, religious expectation and family contradictions. Amid poverty and competing parental dreams, she describes finding freedom and possibility through the reading her household rarely encouraged.

Paulette’s carefully planned future collapses when the man she loves dies, leaving her to build a different life around motherhood. An unexpected connection with another young boy expands her family and tests the reach of compassion after profound disappointment.