Novelist · North of England
S. K.Myles
Stories about the things two people never quite manage to say to each other.
“They were never a substitute for anything. They were the actual thing.”
— from Little Fingers
The debut novel
Little Fingers
A chicken shop, a Nokia 3310, and thirteen months that never quite became a love story. Danny is nineteen and out, working Tuesday nights behind a fast-food counter. Ben knows he’s gay and says just one word: sound.
What follows is a year of crates in the yard after close, little fingers touching on the top deck of the bus, and MSN conversations until four in the morning. Ben does all the brave things instead of saying anything. Danny is madly in love and can’t find the sentence either.
Told in two parts — first as Danny remembers it, then as he imagines Ben’s side of the same thirteen months — it’s a book about first love that was never named, and about letting yourself keep something that never happened. Tender, funny, frank and very Stoke.
Contains adult themes and strong language.
“Love turns out to be extraordinarily good at surviving on nothing.”
— from Little Fingers
About
The author
Nobody ever knows. You just have to say it and find out.
S. K. Myles is a novelist from the North of England. He lives in Lancashire with the man he has been with for more than twenty years. Little Fingers is his first novel.
The longer one
Born in 1983, he belongs to the last generation to remember life before the internet. He was a child without it, a teenager when the whole world was discovering it at once, and a young man in the early 2000s, when it all collided: Nokias, dial-up tones, MSN at four in the morning, and feelings you could only say in writing, or not at all.
That collision is where his writing lives. It sits in the space between what people feel and what they manage to say, and in the small, physical, deniable things they do instead. That might be a knuckle on the arm, a hand left on a bus seat, or a message typed and deleted and typed again.
He has spent most of his working life in business and technology, leading teams, winning work and solving other people’s problems. He also has a long love of radio and the people who make it. Radio is a medium built on voices talking to one person at a time, which is probably not a coincidence.
This isn’t a sad book. I’m not a sad person. I’m happy, and very much in love, and I have been for a long time.
But one day I realised the year I was nineteen was still sitting there, whole, and nobody had ever written it down. A chicken shop. A best friend. Thirteen months of nearly. So I wrote it as honestly as I could, with the bits I’ve invented marked plainly. Then I did the harder thing, and imagined his half.
What I most wanted to say is that you’re allowed to keep a love that never happened. It doesn’t take anything away from the life you have. It doesn’t need to be a wound or a secret. It’s just yours.
How he writes
The book is semi-true: real people and a real year, with names and places changed, and invented sections marked so the reader always knows which is which. He writes in plain, northern, spoken English, the way people actually talked in 2002, typos and all.
What’s next
He’s working on his second book. As with the first, it’s about two people and the thing they can’t quite say.
Say hello
Get in touch
He reads every message, and he’d love to hear from you — especially if Little Fingers reminded you of someone.
— S. K.