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 two stories I published first, along with three new ones. Some readers may already know the earlier ones. 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.
All five stories are written in the spirit of the old fairy tales I grew up with. The kind that don’t rush to explain themselves, and that are not afraid of a little darkness. They are not retellings of existing myths, but original stories that borrow their feeling from folklore.
In one story, 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 finds herself forced to choose between the life she knows and something very different. There is a boy walking 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, and the ways we change when the road becomes harder than we thought it would be. Magic appears now and then, but not as a spectacle. It usually arrives 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 speak to many of the same ideas. The fragile things we carry with us, like the love we have for another person, or especially the love we carry for our children. The people who shape us. The strange paths that sometimes lead us somewhere we didn’t expect.
The title comes from a small belief I have about life. Most of us hope for a straight road, but it rarely works out that way. The bends arrive whether we want them or not. And perhaps that’s not 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 cannot promise these stories will change anything, but I hope they find you at the right bend in the road, and stay with you for a while.
Included in this collection:
• Wilson and Hound