The Man Everyone Needed

Everyone needs him. Who asks if he's all right?

In Millhaven, Yorkshire, Daniel is the reliable one: a husband, a son and the man everyone expects to have an answer.

His online business is struggling. His family means well. Yet every conversation about work seems to turn into an examination of his entire life. Daniel answers with jokes, because it is easier than explaining why an ordinary question can leave him shaken, or how much of his past he has kept to himself.

Then an old drawing finds its way back into his hands, and memories he has spent years avoiding begin to surface. With his wife Ellie beside him, Daniel must learn something harder than being needed: how to ask for care, and how to let the people who love him learn how to give it.

The Man Everyone Needed is a darkly funny, quietly hopeful contemporary novel about family expectations, hidden wounds, trust, marriage and the small, imperfect acts that make healing possible.

A story for book clubs and for readers who love emotionally layered, character-driven fiction, and for anyone who has ever been needed more often than heard.

By S. Jindal