Books from an author who has lived a life across cultures.
Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and language — written between departures, published without a hometown.
Published, in print, and available now.
In progress, in fragments, in no particular order. Excerpts land here as they're ready — react, or leave your email, and help decide what gets finished first.
Memoir
He arrived in his twenties, six-foot-something in a country built on fitting in, and spent the better part of a decade learning exactly how far that got him. Big Man in Japan follows the unglamorous years — the wrong trains, the right friendships, the slow humiliation of being fluent enough to be misunderstood in new and specific ways. It is not a love letter to Japan, and it is not a takedown either. It is what actually happens when you stay long enough for the novelty to wear off and the real relationship to begin.
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Memoir
Little Pink Ribbons begins with a single, unremarkable object, kept for reasons the narrator won't yet explain, and builds outward from there — through work, weather, small domestic rituals, and a feeling the narrator keeps just out of frame. It reads, for most of its length, like a book about almost anything else, which is rather the point: some things can only be approached sideways. Told in fragments, it withholds more than it reveals, right up until it doesn't. By the last page, the title means something it didn't at the first.
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Thriller
Every country has words that separate the people who belong from the people performing belonging — pronunciations, references, the small tests nobody teaches you on purpose. Encoded follows an operative whose entire career is built on knowing Canada's, and the outsider trying to learn them fast enough to pass. What starts as tradecraft becomes something closer to an identity crisis: the closer you study a shibboleth, the less sure you are which side of it you're actually on. A spy thriller for anyone who has ever wondered what gives them away.
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Literary Fiction
A man wakes up one morning changed — not physically, not yet obviously, but changed in the way isolation changes a person when nobody is watching closely enough to notice. The Unseen Path borrows its shape from Kafka and its subject from the present: the private radicalization that happens one forum post, one grievance, one lonely night at a time. It does not excuse what it examines. It asks, with real discomfort, how ordinary the beginning of it looks from the inside, and how far a person can travel before the metamorphosis is complete.
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Non-fiction
HR has a language of its own — reorgs, synergies, right-sizing, engagement scores — and Fore-told sets out to translate it before it translates you. Part field guide, part quiet indictment, it traces how the vocabulary of modern work has shifted as the work itself has, and what the euphemisms are usually covering for. It is written for anyone who has sat in a meeting and felt the specific dread of a word they didn't yet understand. By the end, you will understand it perfectly — and wish you still didn't have to.
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Every book here started as something too honest to publish comfortably. That's still the point.
About the Author
CJ writes from wherever the work happens to be. Raised on a horizon flat enough to watch weather arrive from three days off, the same instinct for reading what's coming now gets pointed at borders, dialects, and the hairline fractures between the self people perform and the self underneath.
What followed was less a career than a long departure — years spent between Asia and Europe, picking up languages, losing addresses, filling napkins and notebooks with lines that eventually became books. A dialect nobody outside one castle town had bothered to write down. A poetry collection assembled from seventeen years of scraps. Longer work now underway, circling the same question from new angles: what does a person become when nowhere is quite home.
No author photo. No hometown. No mention of what pays the bills on a Tuesday. The work is the introduction — everything else stays behind the door it walked through.
Savage Publishing is the print and word imprint of The Savage Group — fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and language, made by one restless hand. No slush pile, no imprint politics: just the work, published when it's ready and not before.
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