Love Never Does
About the book
In a cottage on the edge of the Irish wilderness, Treasa Ó Sionnacháin crosses into the Otherworld to reclaim her stolen child — a boy the Gentry have replaced with a cold branch of rowan wood. Armed with nothing but stubbornness and a love that refuses to be reasoned with, she walks into the dark water, bargains with things older than language, and carries her son back through the frost of a world that was never meant to let her leave. In a flat two bus stops from a Dublin hospital, Maeve maps her son, Theo, into existence, one grant application, one eye-gaze session, one sleepless night at a time. The doctors speak in the language of low-probability outcomes and sustainable care models. Maeve speaks in the language of a mother who has already crossed too many rivers to turn back now. Two women. Two centuries. Two children who have been told, in the particular cruelty of their respective worlds, that they have nothing to say. Love Never Does is a novel about the bargains we make in the dark — the ones no one witnesses, the ones that cost us the version of ourselves we thought we couldn’t live without. It is about the crossing, and the work that waits on the other side. It is about the language of the hand, the language of the eye, and the language of a mother who refuses to stop listening before her child has finished. It is about the kind of love that does not require the beloved to be what the world expects them to be. The kind that does not give up. Love never does.
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About the author
I’m Katie-jo—though most people call me KJ. I’m an autistic, ADHD Christian, writer, musician, wife and mum, trying to make sense of the beautiful, complicated tangle of faith, family, disability and everyday life. I write about the places where these things meet: in churches, classrooms, homes and communities, and in the quiet moments when we are learning how to love one another better. For many years I worked in schools and alternative provisions, supporting young people with additional needs and helping educators create spaces where nobody has to hide who they are in order to belong. I’ve taught, trained, guest lectured and contributed to NHS materials on making healthcare more accessible for autistic people. I also work alongside families navigating the often bewildering world of disability support, including through my role as a parent representative for the Bedford Borough Parent Carer Forum. Much of my life has been shaped by home education. I’ve educated my own children, helped run large online communities and supported local cooperatives, discovering along the way that learning rarely follows a straight line—and that the best classrooms often begin with curiosity, trust and a willingness to listen. I care deeply about disability inclusion in churches, and about the work of making room at the table not as a gesture of kindness, but because everybody belongs there. Through fiction, music, advocacy and the occasional stubborn conversation, I’m trying to help the Church listen more carefully, love more bravely and become a place where people can arrive exactly as they are.
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