Lost, wounded and alone, Jesse Bartos wanders the wilderness with no memory of how he came to be there. He only knows that he is in danger, and that the suitcase in his hand is worth more than his life. At the point of death, he happens upon the abandoned railroad station of Dawn’s Holt, run by an enigmatic family who assure him—despite appearances—that the train will arrive any day. Jesse is desperate to escape, until he meets Reo, the family’s eldest son . . . As the days pass, Jesse falls deeper under the spell of Dawn’s Holt, until he’s caught in a battle between past and future, memory and reckoning and fiercest of all, between his conscience and his own heart.

The first grown-up book I remember reading was the thriller Air Bridge by Hammond Innes. That caught me with its opening where the protagonist, fleeing the car crash that followed some criminal activity, stumbles into a remote airfield and, in exchange for shelter from the law, gets caught up in the strange aeronautical experiments of the antagonist.

Stark Holborn’s latest novella has the same kind of desperate but enigmatic opening where the protagonist Jesse stumbles away from some enterprise that has gone disastrously awry and drags himself up the sand covered railway tracks to the desolate station of Dawn’s Holt with its four tumbledown buildings and its nuclear family of custodians, mother Rosmerta, father Lugus, daughter Navia and son Reo.

There is a touch too of Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi in the narrative. A fickle memory makes a somewhat unreliable witness of our first-person protagonist Jesse, as he struggles to make sense of the bizarre environment of Dawn’s Holt, or even to remember the exact sequence of events that brought him there, or the significance of the suitcase he daren’t open and yet is too scared to part with.

Holborn’s characters have wonderfully distinct personalities. Where Rosmerta is briskly matriarchal, Lugus is dour, intimidating and yet also defeated in his constant battle with the sand that obscures the tracks to Dawn’s Holt. Navia has the side-eye knowingness of youth, but with more justification perhaps than the usual teenager’s omniscience. Reo however, dances at the edge of the story for a lot of the narrative but is as enigmatically captivating in his absence as he is in when eventually very much present in Jesse’s experience.

The futures of both Jesse and Dawn’s Holt are entangled by a plot in which both are broken. Jesse wounded, the station near derelict and non-functioning. A barn holds the abandoned baggage of passengers who have moved on – maybe Jesse’s suitcase might end up there – except that there is no train coming as Lugus can never clear the tracks nor fix the broken signal. The only way out of Dawn’s Holt is by the road, but that brings its own perils of a predatory band of motorcyclists and their leader dispensing promises and collecting debts with brutal ambivalence. In a world where even the hens’ eggs are wrong, there is a battle for Jesse and his strange hosts to put things right, but there is a price to be paid.

Holborn’s prose weaves its way through this surreal setting and complex cast binding them together in a delightful reading experience. I teach an open learning creative writing class at Queen’s University Belfast and have made a lot of use of Holborn’s writing to illustrate ideas of concrete sensory imagery and sharply effective word choices. As one of my side notes (‘Imagery is Glorious’) highlights, For the Road has given me a fresh slew of examples to call on.

A stack of playing cards, limp and stained with the oils of many hands.

There are hens in there, ragged feather-duster things, with gnarled feet, scritching at the ground, driven by chicken memories of soft earth and worms.

And I’m a child again, smarting from the bite of the belt buckle against my flesh, face hot-clogged with tears.

Grey washing crisping beneath the sunless sky.

The day’s already hot, sun sticking to the threadbare curtains like syrup.

In a short book, as ever, Holborn packs in some glorious writing with a sense of her favoured literary hunting grounds of the American West, but context (and the motorbikes) fixes this volume a little later in time than the alternative histories of Triggernometry, with Jesse fleeing the outfall of some Great Depression era heist.

I always enjoy an author’s afterword and acknowledgements for the insights it can give into a book’s provenance and context. In For the Road Holborn makes her first debt of gratitude to Bob Dylan for the song One More Cup of Coffee (the novella’s title is directly taken from the song lyrics) because, as Holborn puts it – appropriately enough for such a lyrically fantastic novella – ‘This is a story born from songs.’

Writers have varied relationships with music, for some a background song is a soothing aid to concentration, for others (like me) it is a distraction beyond the ken of my limited multitasking. However, there is a difference between music as accompaniment to writing and music as inspiration to writing. In my first creative writing class, as a callow sixth former being driven into some timetabled ‘enrichment’ activities, the teacher played us three pieces of music and invited us to write what the music inspired. That scrap of writing that I produced then – a fragment of near-death experience, redemption and guilt – nurdled away in my head until, over thirty years later, I had built and self- published a whole novel inspired from that scene. So the idea of music that doesn’t just relax the writing muscles, but fires the imagination into new places and characters is a fascinating one.

Dylan’s refrain on ‘one more cup of coffee’ is something we can taste as well as hear as Holborn’s sure handed writing brings the world of Dawn’s Holt and Jesse to life.

The smell of coffee-that’s how I know ‘m not dead. Black-bitter as tarmacadam. A jolt to the blood like a lit cigarette. I open my eyes and it’s there in front of my face, oily in a tin cup.

And yes, I did listen to Dylan’s song as I wrote this review!

For the Road is due for publication August 2025 from PS Publishing, you can pre-order your copy from their website