Title: A Straight Path Tells No Stories
Formats: Print and eBook
Genre: Folklore & Fantasy
Book cover by: Nicki Noermark
Pages: 253
Reading Age: 10 to 18+
Language: English
Release Date: March 2026
Available here: Amazon // Barnes & Noble // Saxo
Briefly about the book:
A Straight Path Tells No Stories is a small collection of the stories I have written so far.
It brings together the first two stories I published, along with three new ones. Some readers may already know the earlier stories. The others are appearing here for the first time. I liked the idea of letting them live together in the same place. To me, they feel like they belong together. But the individual stories are also available on their own, in case one of them appeals to you more than the others.
All five are written in the spirit of the old fairy tales I grew up with. The kind that don’t rush to explain themselves and aren’t afraid of a little darkness. They are not retellings of existing myths or folklore, but original stories that borrow something from the way those older stories see the world.
In one, a young girl befriends the giant who lifts the sun into the sky each morning. In another, a baker’s daughter in a small kingdom by the sea is forced to choose between the life she knows and something very different. There is a boy who walks into a forest where the bears sleep. A proud man finds a travelling circus and learns that vanity can take strange forms. And somewhere far from any map, a family of two is given a second chance when a curious star chooses an unexpected place to fall.
The stories are separate, but they share a certain way of looking at the world. They are about love, grief, family, and the ways we change when the road becomes harder than we thought it would be. Magic appears now and then, but rarely as a spectacle. It tends to arrive in the same way it does in the old tales: simply as part of life.
This book exists mostly because I wanted these stories to sit together. They were written at different times, but they seem to circle many of the same things. The fragile things we carry with us. The love we have for another person, and especially the love we carry for our children. The people who shape us. And the strange paths that sometimes take us somewhere we never intended to go.
The title comes from a small belief I have about life. Most of us would probably prefer a straight road, but it rarely works out that way. The bends arrive whether we want them or not.
And perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing.
Because if a road is perfectly straight, nothing much happens on it.
These are stories about those bends in the road.
I can’t promise they will change anything. But I hope they find you at the right bend in yours, and stay with you for a while.
Included in this collection:
The links above will take you to Amazon, but you can also find the book and ebook through most major online booksellers.