Twenty-Eight Years - a novel.

Meet Paul Bellchambers

Every novel begins with a question the writer needs to answer.

My name is Paul Bellchambers. I am a British writer working on my first literary novel, Twenty-Eight Years. This website exists to document that process. From the structural decisions made before a single word of the first draft was written, to the chapters as they take shape, and whatever comes after that.

The novel has been a long time forming. The story it tells — of a man who leaves a long marriage, loses contact with his three children through a high-conflict divorce, and spends decades living with that loss — is not a story that contemporary literary fiction tells often, or tells from this angle. The shelves carry Ferrante’s account of the abandoned wife, Cusk’s forensic autofiction, Knausgård’s monumental self-examination. There has been very little written that gives serious literary attention to the experience of the man who left. The father who is estranged, the person whose guilt and grief, their rebuilt life exist in the same space simultaneously. That is the story that Twenty-Eight Years is telling.

The novel spans three decades and seven perspectives — husband, wife, lover, father, sister, son, daughters — all written in close third person, all given equal weight. No single character is the authorised account. No single perspective is the truth. That is, in part, the point.

The Substack

From June 2026, I will be writing about the making of the novel in real time at twentyeightyears.substack.com. That means draft extracts — never complete chapters, always framed as works in progress — alongside essays on the craft decisions behind the book, the research that informs it, and the experience of writing a first novel towards publication.

Free subscribers receive opening pages from twelve of the novel’s twenty-two chapters, plus selected essays of the craft and process writing. Paid subscribers pay £4 per month or £40 per year. As a subscriber you will receive extended extracts during the writing process. If the novel is published, you will get a named acknowledgement in the book and a complimentary digital copy. If you subscribe as a founding supporter for £60 you will get the same as the paid subscriber, plus your name in the book and a signed copy of the actual physical book, free.

If you have found your way here, the story has already touched you in some way. I hope the novel, will earn your time reading it.

Follow the journey on Substack →

Contact me via Substack or email: paul@twentyeightyears.com

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Twenty-Eight Years - the novel I am writing

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Be the Chef in your Kitchen

A View from the Kitchen

The Great Wight Bite

Royal Solent Yacht Club