Carys Bray

Carys Bray is a British novelist and short-story writer whose fiction often studies family, belief, and community. When the Lights Go Out follows Emma and Chris, a married couple whose different responses to climate anxiety expose strains in their household. Hutchinson published the novel in 2020, and a Windmill Books paperback followed in 2021. Bray approaches the couple's disagreements through domestic observation and humor, keeping a global fear rooted in ordinary decisions about heating, food, relatives, and trust. Her earlier collection Sweet Home won the Scott Prize, while A Song for Issy Bradley won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. In 2023, the Royal Society of Literature elected Bray a Fellow. When the Lights Go Out extends her interest in the comforts and constraints of close communities by asking how a family lives with uncertainty when its members cannot agree on what preparedness should mean.