Maybe I could tell a story? Rebecca Hardy on writing her new book

‘There is redemption and reckoning along the way.’

by Rebecca Hardy 17th July 2026

This week I launched my book The Fires That Lie, an upmarket psychological thriller inspired by a road trip I once took. When I came to draft it, starting all the way back in the Covid lockdown, my focus was more on trying to find an escape rather than writing something particularly worthy. In fact, with bad language, violence, inappropriate behaviour, and a rather grisly murder, it isn’t a very ‘Quakerly’ book at all – and yet it was definitely inspired by Quaker witness.