The Labyrinth – Gerty Green

A5, 104p.

I did not lose myself in one moment. I adapted over time.

The marriage began with love.

Then, slowly, without her noticing, she went quiet. She stopped saying things — not because she had nothing to say, but because she had started weighing up whether it was worth it. She checked the mood in the room before she checked in with herself. She made herself smaller, and called it keeping the peace.

Then it broke.

The Labyrinth is Gerty Green’s account of that break, and of the long walk back to herself. It moves through a marriage that hollowed out over decades, the day it collapsed, the months alone in a flat, and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a person again. This is not a self-help book. There is no method in it, no steps, nothing tidied into a lesson at the end. It offers no advice and reaches no verdict on anyone. It stays close to what was real — the body, the silence, the small moments where something shifted. Written in short, spare passages with the white space left in, it reads the way the experience happened: slowly, one step at a time. It is not a book about leaving. Or about staying. It is a book about returning. To yourself.

For readers who have gone quiet in their own lives — in a marriage, a family, a job — and are beginning to notice.

Gerty Green lives on a farm in North West, South Africa,  with her husband and 8 dogs. The Labyrinth is her first book.