This, My Second Life

Patrick Charnley’s This, My Second Life is an astonishing and deeply moving debut built around recovery, vulnerability and the slow reconstruction of self. Drawing on his own near death experience, Charnley crafts the story of 20 year old Jago Trevarno, who returns to a remote Cornish village after being clinically dead for 40 minutes, left with a brain injury that slows his thoughts and narrows his world. Sheltering with his taciturn but tender uncle Jacob on a subsistence farm overlooking the Atlantic, Jago’s life becomes pared back to elemental rhythms — weather, animals, daylight — creating a fragile sanctuary where healing is possible but emotional stasis feels dangerously close. Beneath the quiet is the question that shadows every page: can Jago stay hidden from his past and the outside world forever? 

Charnley’s prose is spare, luminous and intensely observant, capturing both the sensory richness of Jago’s altered perception and the emotional restraint imposed by his injury. Food, weather, the glow of starlight, the hiss of oil lamps — everything familiar is recast with childlike clarity and reverence. Critics note how Jago drifts between vivid sensory rediscovery and brittle, fragmented memories of hospital and rehab, rendering his voice strikingly authentic. Interwoven into this delicate recovery are the stabilising presences of characters like Granny Carne, keeper of village lore and secrets, and the more destabilising return of Sophie, Jago’s first love, whose reappearance threatens the balance he has fought to regain. 

But the novel’s emotional stakes sharpen when Jago becomes entangled with Bill Sligo, a local villain determined to seize a field concealing an old mineshaft on Jacob’s land. Vulnerable yet driven by a desire to repay his uncle’s kindness, Jago steps into a murky conflict he is not equipped to navigate. The tension between his physical fragility and growing resolve gives the novel both its beating heart and its narrative propulsion. What emerges is a powerful, poetic meditation on trauma, resilience, and the uncertain courage required to step back into a world that once broke you. Beautifully written and rich with atmosphere, This, My Second Life marks Charnley as a remarkable new voice in literary fiction.