Fiction by Claire Buttrum | Bright Raven Press
Book Your Free Ticket
|
Shamanic Drumming & Book Reading Event
|
7pm 23rd September
|
Book Your Free Ticket | Shamanic Drumming & Book Reading Event | 7pm 23rd September |
Why Fiction?
As a therapist, the natural thing for me to have done would be to write non-fiction self-help books (I do, but you can find out more about that here). But there’s something that fiction can do for us that self-help can’t: fiction is one of the most powerful ways we find ourselves in other peoples’ stories.
As a coach and therapist, I have spent years sitting with families navigating neurodivergence, eating disorders, loss, and systems that don't quite fit them. I’ve also lived this system myself as a neurodivergent, hyper mobile, migraine POTSIE, middle-aged woman and mother.
Bright Raven Press exists to bring those stories to life — fictionalised, but true in the ways that matter.
Fiction also lets me scratch my creative itch and explore the beauty of nature and my love of animals and their sacred role in healing.
Fiction for people who feel big, notice everything, and have spent a lifetime being told to do neither.
“[Claire] captured...the images of the wildlife and the way that nature, movement and music are the healers.”
What We Publish
The Liminal Series is a collection of literary novellas from Claire Buttrum, published under her own imprint, Bright Raven Press.
Liminal means the space in between. Each book in the series inhabits exactly that space.
A teenage girl caught between who the medical system says she is and who she knows herself to be.
A grieving father standing at the threshold of acceptance, unable yet to cross.
A woman trapped between the life the world demands of her and the loneliness she actually lives within
These are quiet books. Atmospheric, precise, and deeply felt. They do not rush. They do not shout. They sit with their characters in the difficult, in-between places.
These are not self-help books. They are stories. But they are written by someone who knows what it is to witness a family in crisis, to see a young person misunderstood by the systems meant to care for them, and to believe that story, the right story, can be its own kind of medicine.
These books are for the invisible. The unheard. The ones the system missed. And for everyone who has ever stood at a threshold wondering if it was safe to cross.
Bright Raven Press is small, intentional, and rooted in place. Our books are set in Cambridgeshire and the East of England, written for readers who want fiction that asks real questions.
Stories that sit with difficult things in liminal space
Liminal: of or relating to a threshold. The space between worlds. The moment before transformation. The place where one thing ends and another - not yet named - begins.
The List
Our Books
book one | 2026
Little Bird
Told through the eyes of twelve-year-old Jake - the invisible sibling - as his sister Olivia spirals into crisis and a medical system that can’t quite hear her.
Print and ebook out now.
book two | release date 23rd October
Under the Willows
n a hushed fenland house, a woodworker and his autistic son move around a grief they can't speak. They eat in silence beneath the weight of all that isn’t said.
Under the Willow is a tender, deeply sensory portrait of a father and son navigating the aftermath of loss. It is a story about the unspoken languages we build to survive, the comfort of routine, and the small, unexpected moments in which something long frozen begins, quietly, to move.
Print and e-book release October
Sign up to Claire’s monthly newsletter
And get a free copy of the Little Bird pantoum poem.
Featured In
Claire's work has been recognised in print, on air, and in leading publications for women's wellbeing and personal growth.
Radio
Brum Radio
Claire’s interviewed about her work as a somatic therapist in Cambridgeshire and her book, Little Bird.
Print Feature
Cambridge Independent
Feature on Little Bird and upcoming works
Radio & Podcast
BBC Sounds
Interviewed on BBC Sounds, the evening autobiography leafs through the chapters of Claire's life.