Memory ∙ Time ∙ Perception
Words ∙ Sounds ∙ Images

I write literary fiction that explores memory, perception, identity, and the fragile structures through which we attempt to understand ourselves. Alongside my writing, I work as a painter and musician, with each practice informing the others.

I am the author of four completed novels. Three explore related philosophical questions from different planes of existence while remaining entirely independent works.

The Desert Lake follows multiple voices circling a shared body of water, each approaching a point where the usual strategies have stopped working.

Photo Booth follows a drifter and writer through the Florida Keys in a world quietly calibrated to receive him, exploring what remains of identity when experience itself becomes mediated.

The Waiting Room is an ensemble novel set in a liminal afterlife, where the ground thins beneath insistence and firms beneath admission, asking what survives when certainty falls away.

A fourth novel, Red Mesa Motel, stands apart. Kachina, Kachi, as she prefers, arrives at a remote motel in the American Southwest after eleven hours of driving, a loaded gun at her hip and a plan she has been sharpening for weeks. The Red Mesa is a place where things enter easily and are not required to leave the same way. What follows is not quite what she came for.

Across fiction, music, and visual art, the questions remain consistent: memory, perception, and what persists when the self stops insisting.

I am based in the UK.

Enquiries: nicolas.james@mail.com
Telephone: +44 (0)7792 771148