Standalone
The Weight On
Release: 15 December 2026
When the roof starts to talk, a good pitman listens.
Kindle pre-order planned from 6 December.
November 1988. On the fell above Haggerburn, the Drift is a small pit with a closure review hanging over it. The town is still split by the strike four years on, and still paying off the debts.
Len Maddison is the face deputy. He writes the warning signs in the report book, and with the pit's future on every man's mind, he lets the shift run. His son Robbie, nineteen, has just started on the face.
On a Monday morning in November the roof comes in. Eight men are sealed in behind a sixty-metre fall, Len and Robbie among them.
Above ground, Len's wife Peg waits with the other families, while a young surveyor nobody listens to, a mines rescue team and a drilling crew on the fell race the water and the clock. Underground, in the dark, men who haven't spoken since 1984 have to keep each other alive.
A dark novel of a pit disaster, a divided town and the weight people carry for each other.
Opening extract
You hear it first in your knees.
Not your ears. Your ears are full of the panzer and the shearer and the hiss of the sprays and the hundred small complaints of steel, and they gave up telling you anything useful forty years ago. But your knees are on the floor of the seam, and the floor is the bottom of everything, and when the bottom of everything moves, your knees know.
It is not a big movement. A shiver. The kind of thing a horse does with its skin when a fly lands. A young lad would not notice it.