‘Die Trying’ by Eleanor Barker-White

Published by HarperNorth,
26 March 2026.
ISBN: ‏978-0-00858697-3 (PB)

Die Trying is Eleanor Barker-White’s second book. Her much-praised debut appeared nearly two years ago, in February 2026. That novel, My Name Was Eden, is a thriller about a girl called Eden who survives a potentially fatal drowning accident with no apparent harm apart from an abrupt personality transformation. Eden’s mother, Lucy, finds it disturbing that her daughter now prefers to call herself Eli, the name she had given Eden’s unborn twin sister. Lucy also puzzles on how her daughter is now calm and rational whereas Eden had been notably wild and maddening. Can it be that the child who survived drowning is Eli rather than Eden? 

Die Trying also features suspenseful psychological conundrums with elements of the supernatural. Barker-White specializes in producing stories about messy family relationships that are predictable but presented and resolved in a fashion that is startling in its originality. In her second novel, she paints a convincing portrait of Adam and Jemma, a mismatched pair, parents of a toddler named Toby. The two alternate in telling the story through their own viewpoints. Adam is responsible and hardworking, someone very good at numbers, employed as a network analyst for a wealth management firm. His wife Jemma is his complete opposite. A woman who has trained in sports massage, she engages in spontaneous behavior, radiates confidence, and prioritizes her needs above those of anyone else. Adam’s painful past—a lonely peripatetic childhood with his parents, ending in his living alone with his mother when his father deserts them for an attractive young woman—means he dotes on his wife and son and relies on them for happiness and stability. But Jemma soon tires of her husband’s neediness and predictability, cheats on him with another man, and asks Adam to leave the family home and rent a drab little bedsit.  

Luck, fortune, fate, chance: all these factors come into play in this tawdry family drama through the presence of a solid glass die, three times larger than usual, that Adam’s mother had chanced upon many years earlier in a charity shop where she worked. It is a die that seems to possess magical powers, to control those who roll it seeking answers, making decisions on their behalf they must obey. The die mirrors the world of Die Trying in which characters are puppets of destiny, the victims of karma, with any sense of their being able to exert individual will an illusion. When Adam uses his die in a wellness podcast he begins with Will, an old friend, he finds his life taking a direction he never could have predicted let alone chosen for himself. 

Like My Name Was Eden, Die Trying raises more questions than it answers, but it is none the worse for that, admirable in provoking speculation and inspiring thought. 

Highly recommended.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.  

Eleanor Barker-White holds an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa university. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbit Prize and has had a number of short stories published in Best of British and The People's Friend magazines. She has previously worked with children and families in family courts, His Majesty's Prison service, and children's charities, and remains fascinated by the endless capacity for human resilience. She was born and raised in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, but now lives in Wiltshire with her husband and four children. My Name Was Eden is her first novel. 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising four murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.  

Lea O'Harra – Mystery writer