Cardiff, January 1977. Peter Manley crosses a crowded pub and says three words to a woman he has never met. She is Colette Lawson ? twenty years old, extraordinary, and navigating the world with a courage most people will never be asked for. He is twenty-one, a working-class boy from the same estate, and what passes between them in the next hour will mark them both for the rest of their lives.

Against the Wind is a literary novel in two movements. The first follows Peter across a long life ? the relationship that defined him at twenty-one, the song he heard one evening in the nineties and never put down, the woman he loved and lost and never stopped carrying. The second follows Colette's brother Michael: Welsh Guardsman, Falklands veteran, a man shaped by damage who finds, in a farmhouse above the Mediterranean in his seventies, a French widow, an ancient faith, and something he had stopped believing was available to him.

A novel about being seen. About what we carry across a lifetime and what we find, sometimes, at the end of it. About love that does not possess but endures ? faithfully, quietly, against the wind.