Book Extract: Paper Over It by Ruth Gresty

Published August 30, 2026 | By Laura

Please join me in welcoming Ruth Gresty to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her book, Paper Over It.

Jennifer Jones is in control.

Jen is confident she has complete control over the things that are trying to control her. Until she isn’t. Until she hasn’t. Until she realises she has never been in control at all. She’s been papering over it for years.

It’s the start of the year 2000. A new millennium has arrived. For Jen and her three friends, university life in Manchester is full of possibility and endless fun. Sassiness, spontaneity, marvellous mayhem and youthful optimism reign in the Manchester rain.

But beneath the sometimes brash bravado sometimes even the most resilient, carefree, fun-loving characters who, on the surface look like they are living their best lives, are perilously close to falling apart. Over the course of one unforgettable year, the young women confront their own realities and truths. Some make foolish mistakes and others life changing choices.

Sometimes heartwarming and other times heartbreaking, but always brutally honest. This is a story of friendship, mistakes, self-discovery and acceptance; identity, love and the messy reality of becoming an adult. It’s about the masks we wear, the mistakes and choices we make, and the courage it takes to stop papering over it and face ourselves when everything feels like it’s falling apart.

It’s real, raw, raunchy, sometimes random and frankly rude at times. Just like Jen and her friends.

Ruth has shared an extract from Paper Over It with us all today. Make that drink, find those biscuits, head to that comfortable chair and enjoy.

(Warning: mild language).

*****beginning of extract*****

I have chosen this extract as it hopefully sums up how twenty-one-year-old single mum Jen (the main protagonist of four key characters) is feeling and why she knows she has to somehow evolve and enhance her life. She doesn’t fit into her old one (or her friends) on a day-to-day basis. She is lonely, however much she loves her baby boy. She is also being dragged back into her un-named eating disorder just to try and feel a little control over something.

She has hit a crossroad, on a road in her much-loved Manchester, and knows she needs to make some changes. She just doesn’t really know how yet.

This extract is towards the end of the book and only features one of the four main characters, and I appreciate it gives away the spoiler of Jen having a baby, but hopefully it makes sense why I have chosen this.

End of Chapter 49 – ‘Show me the meaning of feeling lonely’

Joseph is fast asleep, only taking a single suck of his dummy occasionally. She suddenly feels sightly uneasy in her beloved city. Detached in a weird way. She drives south, out of it.

As she crosses the inner ring road and onto the Princess Parkway, a strange cloud descends over her.

The M56 is just lights and sounds in the darkness. She feels tears starting to pour down her face. She isn’t sure why. Her vision becomes a little blurry. She doesn’t feel very well, she feels unsafe. She gets off the motorway at the airport junction and takes the country lanes back to the cottage. Gets herself and her baby home somehow.

Her mum is still out, somewhere. Has been a little cagey of late. She puts her beautiful sleeping baby boy to bed upstairs, goes into the silent snug and cries quietly. “If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” she remembers the question from a lecture. She can’t remember the answer, but right now she feels like the silent falling tree. She is so very lonely.

She tries to puke up the cheese and tomato toastie she ate a few hours earlier. It’s just bile now. She knew it would be. Bile tastes vile, she knows this. She papers over it and brushes her teeth, trying to rid her mouth of the metallic taste.

She kisses his sleeping face goodnight and goes to bed on her mattress on the floor, right next to his cot. She stares up at the beams in the ceiling lightly lit by Joseph’s night light.

The cottage is over a hundred years old and the four old beams which span the width of her and Joseph’s room go right up into the apex roof of the pitched ceiling. Joseph’s cot is in the eaves. She ponders about the stories the beams could tell. How many people and pageants they have silently looked down upon. She wonders how many babies they have watched being created, how many they have seen being born. How many tears and tantrums they have witnessed, how much love and laughter they have observed, and how many people they have watched die.

All this wistful wondering and pensive pondering. She really needs to get her shit in gear.

“I really need to get my shit in gear,” she says to the sleeping Joseph and Cherish, the sloping ceiling and the silent beams.

Back in London, the sextet are heading out of the cinema in the most amazing spirits. Spontaneously deciding where they are going to go next. The night is young!

“That was absolutely brilliant,” Lou says about ‘Billy Elliot’. “Such a shame Jen wasn’t here to see it. She’d have loved it.”

And she absolutely would have.

Show me the meaning of being lonely.

Backstreet Boys.

*****end of extract*****

About Ruth Gresty –

Ruth has worked in Marketing for twenty-seven years and has always loved writing and storytelling. Understanding people and their behaviour, creating stories that resonate and developing engaging and enduring narratives have all been key to success in her professional background.

From a personal perspective, Ruth is a Manchester born, bred and based menopausal mum of three boys (twelve, fifteen and twenty seven). She spends most of her weekends trying to manage the family mayhem with her partner Simon and watching their younger boys on the sideline of various sports pitches hunting for a loo (occasionally having to resort to a wild wee), a sausage sandwich and a brew while trying to keep warm in doubled-up big socks (mainly stolen from the males in her house) and multiple layers (having had it drilled into her since childhood that it is the number of layers that count, not the thickness of each layer – the complete opposite of friendships).

A nasty accident on Good (Bad) Friday in 2024 meant she spent several months sat on her arse with one leg having to be perpetually higher than said arse. As an energetic, self-confessed curator of chaos, she needed something to focus on and keep her from going frankly crazy. And keep her family from going crazy too. She found that you can’t do much when you’re in acute pain with one leg in the air (including the jigsaws and ‘paint by numbers’ well-wishers had kindly gifted her). But you can read, reflect, think and you can definitely reminisce and daydream. And you can write. Which is what she did.

Her debut novel, Paper Over It, combines her sometimes over-enthusiastic imagination with insights gained from growing up in the 80s and becoming a young mum in the late 90s, her silent struggle with eating disorders in her earlier years, the power of some relationships and the destructive nature of others, and the joy of family, friendship, loyalty, hope and laughter.

Say hello to Ruth on Facebook and Linkedin.

Buy Paper Over It on Amazon UK, Amazon US, Barnes & Noble and Waterstones.