The story behind the stories.
Joel Hicks writes emotionally charged fiction exploring power, desire and the consequences that follow unconventional decisions — while staying true to real life experiences that could be yours.
His work focuses on complex relationships and the tension between control and vulnerability. Drawing on a life lived between the UK, Europe and the United States — across careers in project management, IT, tourism, real estate and a spell as a sailboat skipper — his stories examine what happens when ideas that started out clear begin to blur.
He came to fiction late. With a family background steeped in literature, writing had always been in his orbit, but Joel didn't start putting his own stories down until his late fifties. He hasn't been able to stop since.
Some relationships don't fit neatly into the space other people leave for them. The Lines Trilogy follows Mia and Joe through the joy, the cost, and the quiet courage of choosing each other anyway.
Set in contemporary London, the trilogy explores themes of power, desire, control, and vulnerability. It's an unconventional romance that doesn't shy away from the messy, complicated realities of two people trying to find their way to each other.
View All BooksThe third and final book in the Lines Trilogy — picks up in the immediate aftermath of the devastating ending to Reckoning with Demons. Mia and Joe are navigating grief for the first time together, and what that grief asks of them is something neither of them anticipated.
With Mia pulled toward her mother's fragility and Joe quietly unravelling under a loss he doesn't have language for, the relationship that fought so hard to exist in Books 1 and 2 now has to prove it can hold weight.
The book follows three movements — from the ashes of what's been lost, through the pressure of a three-month separation when work takes Joe abroad, to the resolution neither of them could have reached without everything that came before.
Expected 2026A solo delivery skipper navigates a spring Mediterranean crossing on an unfamiliar boat — systems unknown, weather worsening, and communication lost within the first day.
At home, his wife feels the silence differently than she expected to. Both are somewhere they've been before: a second marriage that made sense until it quietly stopped.
With nothing but open water and time to think, two people who stopped talking discover what they've actually been saying.
Near-future medical technology can keep a mind intact during an induced coma — constructing a simulated life from the patient's own neural patterns, functional and convincing in every detail. Except the feeling, persistent and unexplained, that none of it is yours.
Two strangers wake inside separate constructed realities and find each other in the space between. When one of them wakes for real, what remains is a blank shadow where a person should be — and a certainty, impossible to explain, that finding them matters more than anything in her correct and functional life.