Carrie has spent her whole life trying to be normal, but it's hard to be normal when you just aren't.

When your hair grows so fast you have to cut it once a week so that it doesn't reach the floor. When you can't always separate your dreams from reality.

Carrie gets a spooky sense that her family are avoiding her, a strange cat won't leave her alone and the man she is in love with doesn't feel the same way.

When the cat leads her to the Lodestone, a shop full of crystals and unicorn figurines, Carrie finds herself on a journey that's both totally bizarre and strangely familiar.

She's going to have to dare to accept how different she really is to find her path, to fix the fractures in her life, and be herself.



Esther Walker is a lifestyle journalist whose work has appeared in The Times and The Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the i and Grazia. She is the author of the cult cooking blog Recipe Rifle and now writes the Substack newsletter The Spike, which has 6,000 subscribers. Her first novel, Well, This is Awkward, was published in 2025. Esther also co-hosts an award-nominated weekly topical podcast with her husband for The Times, called Giles Coren Has No Idea. She lives in London.