These Letters End in Tears: Shortlisted for the 2025 British Book Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year

‘If by some chance you happen on these letters, know that I waited for you. And if you don’t find me, it is not because I stopped waiting…’

A chance encounter on a football pitch in Cameroon sees Fatima cross paths with Bessem, opening up the page for an all-consuming, law and logic defying romance.

Even knowing that same-sex relationships are criminalised, Fatima and Bessem decide to live out their love. All seems to be going well, until one day tragedy strikes, and Fatima disappears…

Thirteen years have passed, and Bessem is now a university professor, keeping her sexuality secret, but the memory of Fatima never leaves her. When one coincidence becomes several, Bessem takes the signs as a cosmic command: to go and find her old lover again.

Told mostly through unsent letters, These Letters End in Tears, powerfully charts all the different ways that love, despite all odds, comes out on top.