Adam Vale

Adam Vale writes about the slow, unglamorous ways people go missing from their own lives, and what it takes to come back.

The Quiet Defection is his first book. It is not a recovery story with a tidy ending, and it doesn't ask anyone to optimise, hustle, or wake at five. It argues something less comfortable: that most people don't blow up their lives, they drift out of them one reasonable decision at a time, and that noticing is the whole job.

Adam Vale is a pen name. He uses one because the book works better when the attention stays on the pattern rather than the person.