Better Wild Than Gone

By Laura Carpenter

BETTER WILD THAN GONE - Laura CarpenterIn Belfast, the city doesn't just hold your history-it repeats it back to you in small, relentless ways: in the shimmer of rain on pavement, in the hush behind a lit window, in the neighbour who knows you're struggling before you've admitted it to yourself.
Better Wild Than Gone is a quiet, fierce literary novel about what it costs to stay-and what it costs to leave.
Set on a residential street where lives overlap like footsteps on wet stone, the story follows a woman trying to rebuild a life that looks ordinary from the outside and feels unsteady on the inside. She is not looking for reinvention. She is looking for steadiness. For truth she can live with. For a way to carry what happened without letting it decide everything that comes after.
In rooms warmed by kettles and routines, in conversations that circle what matters before they finally land, she learns what Belfast has always known: survival isn't only endurance. Sometimes it's care. Sometimes it's letting yourself be seen. Sometimes it's allowing love-quiet, complicated, real-to exist without performing for anyone.
Laura Carpenter writes with emotional restraint and razor-clean observation, finding the extraordinary inside the everyday: the tenderness people offer without naming it, the violence of silence, the bravery of showing up when disappearing would be easier. This is not a story of grand gestures. It's a story of persistence-of the soft, stubborn choices that turn a life back toward the light.
If you love literary fiction with a prestige-drama feel-grounded, intimate, and deeply human-Better Wild Than Gone will stay with you long after the last page.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G94KYPPY
• ISBN13: 9798279042005
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 225 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"