The collection
Novels, poems and stories written across decades and landscapes. Select a title to read more about each book and where to find it.
In progress & forthcoming
Forthcoming memoir
A Writer’s Life in Key West
In her forthcoming memoir, Rosalind Brackenbury returns to the places, friendships, and encounters that have shaped her life as a writer. Key West is at its heart, but the stories travel beyond the island, following the connections between writing, community, departure, and return.
Working title; cover a work in progress.
Publication date to be announced
Discover the memoir →
Forthcoming novel
A new novel set in the Lubéron region of Provence, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in May 2027.
Forthcoming, May 2027
Now available for preorder
About the novel →
Read about Bone WhispersFiction
Returning from the US to her inherited house on the Dorset coast, Nessa hears that a woman’s bones have been uncovered after a cliff fall. Old paths and returning memories draw her toward a buried truth.
About the book
Read about Light Over IslandsStories & Novellas
Key West Stories
Stories gathered over thirty years in Key West: quarrels and reconciliations, storms and crossings, a Christmas party beneath a mango tree, and ordinary lives transformed by the island’s extraordinary light.
About the book
Read about Elena, Leo, RoseStories & Novellas
A Novella
An eternal triangle with a new twist and a sting in the tail: a polished, sensual and searching love story about the joy and difficulty of being embodied in this world.
About the book
Read about Seas Outside the ReefFiction
Second edition
Emilia de Soto comes to Key West to await her estranged husband’s arrival from Cuba and meets Harry, an American sailor. Their attraction forces a choice between a distant marriage and a new love.
About the book
Read about Without HerFiction
When Hannah disappears from her family house in the south of France, her oldest friend Claudia joins the search, and must reckon with jealousy, loyalty, and the complicated geometry of a lifelong friendship.
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Read about A Virtual ImageFiction
In the charged world of the late sixties, Ruby searches through France for her missing childhood friend Anna. A sensuous, dreamlike novel of friendship, love, freedom and the unsettling pull of absence.
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Read about A Day to Remember to ForgetFiction
Lucy and Philip, a progressive young couple in the late 1960s, encounter the force of family history during a birthday visit. Ros’s first novel observes generational conflict and human frailty with concentrated precision.
About the book
Read about Bonnard’s DogPoetry
Poems published by Hanging Loose Press in 2015 and dedicated to the poet Allen Meece. The title poem can be read on this site in English, with Geneviève Liautard’s French translation alongside.
About the book
Read about Invisible HorsesPoetry
Poems of wonder and recognition, rooted in a deeply lived and closely attended life: childhood, friendship, age, the body, appetite and gratitude.
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Read about The Lost Love Letters of Henri FournierFiction
A young researcher in Paris meets the elderly Pauline, whose memories and letters reveal an illicit love before the First World War. Across generations, the novel asks what it means to risk, lose and find love again.
About the book
Read about Miss Stephen’s ApprenticeshipOn Writing
How Virginia Stephen Became Virginia Woolf
A novelist’s investigation of how Virginia Stephen, educated at home rather than at school or university, made herself into Virginia Woolf, and what her apprenticeship can offer writers today.
About the book
Read about The Novel in YouOn Writing
A novelist’s guide to writing better fiction
A small book by Rosalind Brackenbury, published by Antaeus Books in 2011.
About the book
Read about Paris Still LifeFiction
After her art-dealer father dies, Gaby leaves America for Paris. A stranger who resembles him, a long-kept affair and a seventeenth-century painting unsettle everything she understood about her father, and about herself.
About the book
Read about The Third SwimmerFiction
A marriage shaped by wartime London reaches a crisis on the south coast of France in 1952, when an impulsive rescue at sea forces Olivia and Thomas to confront what remains between them.
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Read about Becoming George SandFiction
Maria Jameson’s contemporary affair is interwoven with George Sand’s relationship with Frédéric Chopin, connecting two women across history in a searching novel about love, freedom and the demands of self.
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Read about The House in MoroccoFiction
In an old stone house on Morocco’s east coast, an American journalist encounters desire, cultural difference and the buried story of her mother’s visit there in 1936.
About the book
Read about The Joy of the Nearly OldPoetry
Rich, fluent poems charting a writer’s pilgrimage through Key West, England, Paris, literature, age and the vivid textures of a fully inhabited world.
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Read about The Circus at the End of the WorldFiction
A young Tasmanian juggler crosses the mainland, Paris and London in search of his absent mother. Juggling becomes both inheritance and compass in a lyrical story of family and self-discovery.
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Read about The Beautiful Routes of the WestPoetry
Poems of lovers, mothers, friends and necessities: intimate distances observed with passion and clear conviction.
About the book
Read about Windstorm and FloodFiction
Against Hurricanes Georges in South Florida and Mitch in Honduras, a Key West preacher tries to salvage his church, his faith and the remains of a life altered by loss.
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Read about Between Man and Woman KeysStories & Novellas
Short Stories
Stories set in the Florida Keys, Paris, the south of France and London, alive with ominous possibility and turns of revelation.
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Read about Yellow SwingPoetry
Poems about relationship and separation, childhood and departed parents, travel, romance and the political pressures of the modern world.
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Read about The True Story of Henrietta Penelope HenStories & Novellas
The persecution and redemption of Key West’s famous feral poultry, told by avian matriarch Henrietta Penelope Hen and illustrated by Miranda Brackenbury.
About the book
Read about The Woman in the TowerFiction
A modern story of women struggling to relate to the outside world while trapped in a circle of time where nothing changes.
About the book
Read about No Such Thing as a Free LunchStories & Novellas
Ros’s early short-story collection returns fifty years after its first appearance, with original illustrations by Michael Brackenbury and a new introduction by A. L. Kennedy.
About the book