The Unraveling of Miranda Hale

Every life is a story we learn to tell ourselves. We collect fragments—names, places, faces, scents—and stitch them into something that feels coherent enough to live inside. But what happens when the story you’ve been given doesn’t belong to you? When the memories that anchor you are not memories at all, but a carefully arranged stage set—painted, lit, and controlled by unseen hands?

The Unraveling of Miranda Hale began with that question.

This novel follows Miranda as the quiet, contained life she has built in Edinburgh is shattered by two words: “Remember Prague.” From that moment, her existence becomes a kind of living palimpsest, the present scraped thin as a hidden narrative presses up from beneath. Her journey across continents - through Prague, Florence, Marrakech, Siberia, South America, and beyond - is not simply a chase through exotic locations, but a mapping of the interior terrain of memory: how a scent can detonate a buried recollection, how a melody can open a door you didn’t know existed.

Along the way, Miranda discovers that nearly everything she has believed about herself is a fiction. The people who raised her, the colleagues she trusts, the country on her passport - each of these turns out to be part of a protective mythology designed to keep her alive, but also to keep her ignorant. The crime she witnessed as a child has rippled outward into corridors of power she never imagined, ensnaring governments, corporations, and clandestine organizations. And standing at the center of it all is a woman who must decide whether knowing the truth is worth the cost of living with it.

Although The Unraveling of Miranda Hale contains the machinery of a global thriller - shadowy operatives, coded messages, conspiracies that span decades - its heartbeat is intensely personal. This is, above all, a story about identity and belonging: about what it means to discover that your history has been edited, and about the courage it takes to reclaim authorship of your own life. It is also a story about the families we are born into, the families we are given, and the families we choose in the aftermath of betrayal.

Stylistically, the novel mirrors Miranda’s fractured consciousness. The narrative does not move in a straight line; instead, it bends and doubles back, shifting between present action and recovered memories, between what Miranda believes and what she dares to remember. Flashbacks, hallucinations, and sensory triggers blur into one another, inviting you to inhabit the same unstable ground she treads. As Miranda begins to piece together her past, you are asked to assemble the story alongside her—to notice what doesn’t quite fit, to feel the tension between what is said and what is omitted.

By the time Miranda stands at the edge of a new dawn over the Bosphorus, the question that first haunted her - Who am I, really? - has transformed into something even more unsettling: Now that I know, what will I do? The choice she faces is, in its own way, the choice we all face when confronted with an uncomfortable truth: retreat into comforting illusion, or step forward into a reality that is more dangerous, but more honest.

I invite you to travel with Miranda through the cities, ruins, and borderlands of this book, and into the shifting landscape of her mind. As her memories unspool and the conspiracy tightens around her, I hope you’ll not only be compelled by the mystery of what happened, but also moved by the deeper mystery of who we become when the stories we’ve lived by begin to fall apart.

Welcome to The Unraveling of Miranda Hale.