Little Ruins
LITTLERUINS
Rebuilding a Life
The Corner is a place where birds with broken wings will come to heal
Looking to begin a new chapter after years on the move, Manni Coe and his partner take a risk and buy ‘The Corner’, a crumbling but beautiful 150-year-old farmstead tucked into a remote valley in Andalusia, surrounded by olive trees. It’s perfect for their unconventional family of three: Jack, Manni and his youngest brother, Reuben. Secluded from the village by a river and in awe of the extraordinary Spanish landscape, Manni watches their land teem with mountain goats and wild boar, red deer and seasonal swallows. He begins to feel that this might be the place where each of them will find their peace.
But nothing is ever so simple. Though their hilltop village offers food, fellowship and guidance, many visitors bring their own problems and troubled pasts over the river. While Manni and Jack work to afford rebuilding The Corner, who will care for Reuben in the way that he deserves? And as Manni starts to realise that the scars from his childhood – kept hidden for all these years – might not have healed at all, a single, terrible event threatens everything the three of them have spent so long building together.
From landscape and poetry to family and friendship, Little Ruins is a heart-mending exploration of human connection, nature’s gifts and the power of love in all its forms.

ARROW
by Manni Coe
Late November and leaves fall with memories of warmth
The River of The Silent Ones runs with colder water
Slow, rush, trickle, burble, down
Colours mute as trees stretch their boughs into empty spaces
A glimmer line of hope frames a cloud
Darker than I am used to seeing
Casts a light
Clearer than I am used to watching
A chilled wind rushes past my face, tickling the very core of me
And it is then that I hear the echo of him
A lonely stag performs one, final bellow
For his auditorium of wild barbarism
Like an arrow searching its target
The rasp echoes down the gorge and I listen
Until it peters out through the coarse fingers of the oleander
I am weighed down by words as the sorrow leaves me
Darkness creeps over the ridge as the shadows disappear
Only the purity of aim and the immense vista of eternal green
I reach into the nothing to catch the arrow on the wind
Snapping it in two on the nearest boulder of blackening limestone
It hit its target and I can now find my way home
I started writing Little Ruins during the first lockdown of 2020. Initially, it took the form of short stories and anecdotes depicting characters that had come into our lives since we bought an old olive farm in Andalucia, in December of 2015. We are still in touch with some of them. There are others we hope never to see again.
A second draft took me deeper into the history of the house and its previous owners. I began writing in an abandoned cottage at the back of the property (from where I write this now) that has no electricity or wifi. It was here that I began to hear whispers from the past; not only from the house’s history but from my own.
A third draft led me back to some very painful periods in my own life; times of trauma and distress. An early reader of this draft asked me,’Have you ever written about these events before?’ I told him I hadn’t. ‘It shows,’ was his emphatic reply. ‘None of this is publishable.’
A fourth draft was a complete rewrite as I attempted to transform rage into grace. A book began to form. A memoir with a beginning and a middle. The ending didn´t happen until I was ready to write it in real time. I had to write myself to the finale; ink led me to my own redemption.
My fifth draft honed in on character and place. I wanted you, the reader, to engage early on and trust me to take you on a journey.
My sixth draft was bought by Canongate.
My seventh draft was the result of collaborative discussions with my agent and my editor.
My eighth draft went to COPY EDIT.
I’m finishing my ninth draft now.
Four years after sitting down to tell amusing tales of this house and the community we live in, the story has morphed into a personal journey of healing. It is this house, this land, these hills, this silence syncopated by birdsong and the long, low, hum of the river that has led me home; not to a physical location but to a space within me, somewhere between my head and my heart.
I am now ready to share its pages with a wider audience, not to sensationalize anything that has happened but in a bid to help other people who have passed through (or who are passing or who are yet to pass through ) similar challanges. I have been able to write from a place of healing, rather than a place of pain. I have folded away the suffering within these pages.
Publication Date: tba
Imprint: Canongate
Format: Hardback
ISBN:
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Photography: Manni Coe
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