Frequently asked questions

No. Kerston Ridge is a fictional town located in the California foothills. Its landscape, community structure, local institutions, and atmosphere draw on the character of Northern California towns, but Kerston Ridge exists only in the novels.

Killing Me Softly is designed to stand on its own while leaving room for further stories connected to Lena, Mark, and the wider Kerston Ridge community.

Killing Me Softly is not currently available for purchase. Any future publication and availability information will be announced on this website and through Gillian Foster’s official social media accounts.

No. Killing Me Softly is a work of fiction. Its characters, relationships, and events are imagined, although the emotions at the center of the novel—grief, longing, regret, loyalty, and the need to be understood—are deeply human.

The novel may appeal to readers who enjoy emotionally complex, character-driven fiction, morally complicated relationships, family secrets, second chances, and small-town settings.

It is written for readers who prefer difficult questions to simple answers and who are interested in understanding every side of a conflict.

Yes. Killing Me Softly is told through multiple perspectives, allowing readers to see how the same events can be interpreted differently by different people.

This structure reflects one of the central ideas of the novel: no one has the whole truth.

Yes, but the second-chance relationship is only one part of the novel.

The story also explores marriage, parenthood, friendship, grief, responsibility, community, and the consequences of choices made many years earlier.

The novel offers hope without ignoring the consequences of its characters’ choices. Its ending completes the central emotional movement of the story while leaving room for the lives of its characters to continue beyond the final page.

The title reflects the quiet, cumulative ways in which love, memory, silence, and unresolved grief can shape a person’s life.

It also evokes the novel’s wider interest in music, emotional recognition, and the experience of being deeply affected by something that is never said directly.

Lena and Mark’s relationship is central to the novel, but their story unfolds within a much wider emotional and moral context.

Their connection cannot be separated from the families they have built, the people they may hurt, or the truths they have carried for sixteen years.

No. Lena is one of the central characters, but the novel also gives space to other members of the Kerston Ridge community.

The different perspectives reveal how incomplete knowledge, private fears, and personal loyalties shape each character’s understanding of the same situation.

Kerston Ridge has the intimacy and community life associated with small-town fiction, but it is not an idealized setting.

It is a place of warmth, loyalty, gossip, public responsibility, social pressure, and long memory. The town can offer belonging, but it can also make privacy almost impossible.

Yes. The novel explores grief, family conflict, emotional betrayal, illness, accidents, addiction, and the long-term consequences of trauma.

These subjects are handled as part of a character-driven story rather than for shock value.

Yes. The novel is particularly suited to book-club discussion because its characters make morally complex choices that can be understood in different ways. Its multiple perspectives invite readers to consider how loyalty, fear, incomplete knowledge, and personal history shape every version of the truth.

News about Killing Me Softly, Kerston Ridge, and Gillian Foster’s writing will be shared on this website and through her official social media accounts.