When Love Fails

When Love Fails is an alternative ending to the Birds series, following What the Earth Remembers. Where Love Remains takes the story in another direction. These books are not consecutive instalments; each asks what could follow from a different course of choices.

The darker possibility interested me because a society does not need to run out of affection before it runs into danger. People may continue to love their families, help their neighbours and act bravely for someone close to them while the arrangements connecting them to strangers fall apart.

I wanted to follow that difficulty through decisions that can seem reasonable when considered one at a time. A condition attached to assistance, a record withheld, a promise made only to one's own group: each may arrive with an explanation. The consequences accumulate beyond the place where the decision was made.

The people in this story still have moments of tenderness and humour. Their love matters even when it cannot repair everything around them. I did not want the scale of the crisis to make their particular lives disappear, or to suggest that an unsuccessful act of care has no value.

This novel is an imagined outcome, not a forecast or a claim that collapse is inevitable. Read beside Where Love Remains, it invites a question about the conditions under which people can continue to care for one another. Read on its own, I hope it remains a story about people you want to stay with, even when the future they face is difficult to bear.

Stuart Corlett