Colette, a Cardiff Story

Cardiff, January 1977. Snow softens the pebbledash of Ely.

In Tenby Road, twenty-year-old Colette Lawson does the tape — four minutes, standing, face perfectly neutral — then dresses in the order she always dresses. Silk no one will see, dark A-line skirt and jumper, grey tapestry coat that flares to the knee, and the black leather knee-high boots she's wanted for two years and has finally bought for herself. She spreads it all out and looks at it. It looks like an outfit belonging to a woman who is taking herself seriously. She steps out and makes clean, precise prints all the way to the bus stop.

In The Maltings in Canton, Peter Manley, twenty-one, is holding court in his own armour: navy double-breasted wool, hair to his shoulders, absolutely sure of who he is. He notices her before he knows her. Then he does know her — not well, but as the quiet kid a year below him at school in Milford Drive. The moment hangs. What could be exposure becomes, instead, recognition.

What follows is not a coming-out novel but a Cardiff love story about being seen versus being placed.

It's told through the textures of the city in the seventies — buses, corner shops, good cups of tea cooling in front rooms, the Capitol queue, dance floors, work clothes. Colette wants to be allowed to be ordinary: exacting about clothes, good at her job, a woman who has decided to navigate the world on her own terms. Peter, who has never had to think about how to be in a room, has to learn what it costs to stand beside someone who has to think about it every time.

From a winter in Canton to London, to a brutal night in Dublin under 1978 Irish law, to a long summer of unsent letters and a phone box ringing unanswered in Ely, to a kitchen in St Hilary on New Year's Eve 1999 — Colette, a Cardiff story is intimate, unsentimental and lit with wry humour. A novel about the courage of assembly: of a self, a life, a home, one precise, chosen detail at a time.