LINDSAY'S ROLE

Lindsay Sael has spent his whole life playing parts he never chose: the disappointing son, the browbeaten husband, the taxi driver going nowhere. When his estranged father dies without a word to him, and his wife's silence becomes the final insult, Lindsay's carefully held-together life comes apart. A domestic violence order strips him of his license, his home, and what's left of his pride.

Fleeing to Queensland's North Coast, Lindsay falls in with a world he never knew existed: horse floats running more than horses, a razor-tongued matriarch who owns half the track, a sex worker with a violent minder, and a gay American couple whose quiet decency unsettles everything Lindsay thought he knew about himself. Chasing money, respect, and something that finally feels like belonging, Lindsay drives deeper into a world of favors that always come due, until a reckless job lands him behind bars.

It's in prison, of all places, that Lindsay discovers the one role nobody assigned him: his own. But freedom brings a reckoning he can't outrun: a friend's overdose, a wife's collapse, and the truth about who he's been all along.

Lindsay's Role is a raw, unsentimental novel about identity, complicity, and the cost of finally writing your own story, for readers of character-driven literary fiction that doesn't flinch from its people's worst days.