In this lesbian romance, there are some journeys you shouldn’t take alone.

The debut novel from hp tune brings together the stories of two very different women whose chance of meeting at an airport changes everything for both of them.

The main characters in this story are Juliet and Mia. Juliet is the author of a book that took the world by storm, and she is now under huge pressure to come up with another one. She’s on her way to Belgium for a self-imposed writer’s retreat, desperately hoping she can find inspiration because right now all she can come up with is blank pages. Mia is rich, brought up in an upper-class lifestyle from birth, and has recently divorced her husband. She’s come out to her family as bisexual and has been well and truly rejected by them. She’s lost, metaphorically speaking, and travelling for reasons that took a while to be revealed in the narrative, but once they were, had me reeling in shock.

Both women from what would seem an unlikely bond after their first meeting, but it’s a testament to hp tune’s writing that what happens between them is completely believable and natural. Before I was even halfway through the story, I was delighted they’d found each other. When events conspire to bring them together at Mia’s home in Scotland, their connection increases. However, as more of their histories, fears, doubts, and insecurities are revealed to each other, more things start to unravel between them. At this point, I couldn’t put the book down, eager to find out if they made it, and how. Again, hp tune’s story-crafting is top-notch here. What makes the characters wobble and falter, and question everything they have makes perfect sense given what we know about the characters.

Juliet and Mia are written with great insight, and the book is evenly split between the two points of view. There are some lovely secondary characters—particularly Mia’s staff—as well as some truly hideous characters like Mia’s entire family and Juliet’s father. Some of the emotion in the passages concerning the families is gut-wrenching. To write such coldness can’t be easy, but hp tune manages it brilliantly. And there’s an intelligence to the writing that lifts this book above a lot of romances out there. It’s a piece about soul-searching journeys delivered without gloss or superficiality, and it gives the writing a depth that’s beyond pleasing.

This is a great debut, highly recommended, and I’ll be keen to discover what hp tune can deliver next.