Liminal. It means threshold. The charged space between one state of being and the next. Where something has already ended but what comes after hasn’t yet found its name.

These novellas live there. Each one places a character at that exact point of suspension: a teenage girl waiting to be recognised by a medical system that keeps getting her wrong; a woman alone in an endless forest, navigating by a map that’s slowly disintegrating; a father standing at the edge of grief, unable yet to take the step that would mean something is truly over.

Nothing in these books is rushed. Nothing is resolved too cleanly. The writing moves at the pace of real interior experience, slow, precise, attentive to the things that don’t get said.

Every title in The Liminal Series is published under Bright Raven Press, Claire Buttrum’s own imprint. The work grows from years of therapeutic practice; from the moments in a session when someone finally feels heard, when a family starts to make sense to itself, when a young person discovers that the system’s version of them was never the whole story.

These are not self-help books. They are literature. But they are written by someone who has sat with people in crisis, who has watched what happens when a person is truly witnessed, and who believes that the right story - told, heard, witnessed at the right moment - can shift something that nothing else could reach.

For the invisible. The overlooked. The ones still standing at the threshold, wondering whether it’s safe to cross.

Books in the series

Little Bird | A family fracturing at its edges. Told through the eyes of the sibling no one is watching. A teenage girl misdiagnosed, misread, and waiting - with extraordinary patience - to be truly seen.

Distant Sky I A woman moves through a vast, mist-covered forest alone. She carries a heavy pack. Her map’s markings are fading. At night, music finds its way through the trees and she is briefly, quietly, at peace. But the forest is not what it appears to be. And neither is the silence that lies beyond it.

Under the Willow I Five days. A grieving father. His neurodivergent son. Almost nothing happens. Everything shifts.