Proof by Contradiction

Proof by Contradiction is Book 1 of The Carrick Brothers: a forbidden age-gap MM romance at a Manchester university, between eighteen-year-old Ewan Carrick and his maths lecturer, Dr Laurence Haldrey, and a complete love story you can read on its own.

Three days in Manchester and Ewan Carrick has already decided he's leaving.

His bag is still zipped at the foot of the bed in halls. If he hasn't unpacked, he hasn't arrived, and if he hasn't arrived he can still go home to Lewisham.

Then Dr Haldrey walks into the lecture theatre, uncaps a marker and rolls up his sleeves, one fold, then two, and the exit plan stops adding up.

Laurence Haldrey is thirty-one. Oxford, then Cambridge, then Manchester: a descent, by Ewan's reckoning. Lancashire vowels, a shirt buttoned to the neck, a compulsory maths module for two hundred economics students and not a second look for any of them. Ewan solves the warm-up problem before the pen stops moving and doesn't put his hand up. Laurence notices anyway.

Office hours on a Tuesday afternoon. A second, harder problem half hidden under his notes. A coffee off campus, to discuss Ewan's progress properly. Then a brass key, a green door in Chorlton, and a secret that could cost Laurence his career and every lie Ewan tells himself about not caring.

Back in London, his big brother Ron rings every Sunday from Mum's kitchen in Lewisham and asks questions Ewan has no intention of answering.

A proof by contradiction starts by assuming the opposite of what you hope is true, and follows it until it breaks.

Good to know

• Reading order: Book 1 of The Carrick Brothers, complete in itself. Book 2, Undefined Terms, is Ron's story; Book 3, Carried the One, is the last. Laurence's side of this same year is the companion novel Unstated Premise, best read after this one.
• Point of view: Ewan only, first person, present tense.
• Heat: open door and explicit, between consenting adults, with light kink talked through first. They cross the line early; the tension is in keeping it secret.
• Ending: happy ever after, no cliffhanger.
• Length: a full-length novel of about 112,000 words, in British English.