Book Extract: The Vision Board By Siobhan Murphy

Published January 29, 2026 | By Laura

Please join me in welcoming Siobhan Murphy to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her latest book, The Vision Board.

Two best friends. Two one-way tickets. And a future that might just surprise them.

Bex and Amy are best friends and total opposites. Bex is cynical, Amy is romantic. Bex is chaotic, Amy is organised. With the prospect of turning 34 just around the corner, neither is where they expected to be at this point in their lives.

Bex is exploring her sexuality and has a string of failed relationships, while Amy is newly single and desperate to fall in love. Armed with a photographic vision board of the future, Bex and Amy put their trust in ‘The Universe’ and fly from London to Bali, then on to Australia in search of adventure, cocktails on the beach and maybe even love.

Almost immediately, Amy finds someone who is the perfect fit for her dream life. While Bex is stuck playing double dates with his best friend, the most pompous man she has ever met, but also one of the hottest. Travelling via white sand beaches, lush rainforests and road trips through idyllic scenery, the images on their vision board begin to transform into reality.

However, people are not always what they seem, and first impressions are not always accurate. Add in a queer, charismatic love interest and a vindictive ex-girlfriend, and the path of true love begins to get a little more complex.

When ‘The Universe’ has its own agenda, is it possible to manifest a happy ever after?

An Enemies to Lovers destination romance with a sprinkling of Pride and Prejudice vibes.

Siobhan has kindly shared an extract with us today. Grab that beverage, find that comfortable chair. We hope you enjoy reading.

(Warning: Mild Language.)

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

This section is the opening to the book. I hadn’t planned to write a romantic comedy but was woken up at 3 am with the character of Bex in my head, telling me about a bingo game. I had no choice but to drag myself out of bed, head to the sofa with a blanket, a cuppa and my laptop and find out exactly what she was banging on about. That is how ‘The Vision Board’ began.

*****

Amy and I are playing ‘Airport Bingo’, and we’ve just ticked ourselves off the list. ‘Get in.’ I shout, striking a flamboyant line through the words, loud, irritating girls who are already drunk, even though it’s first thing in the morning.

The bingo game is a ‘keep Amy calm’ tactic (along with the alcohol I insisted on buying at 6 am). Only one bar was open in the Departures area at that time of the morning. Dark, generic, and utterly soulless, the staff radiated either boredom or abject misery. Anything approaching even basic customer service had left the building. A pungent-smelling lad in a stained apron took our order begrudgingly. One glance at him made me doubt the high star rating on the bar’s hygiene certificate, so I went for liquid refreshments only. Amy was too nervous to eat, and I’d learned from bitter experience that long-haul flights and questionable food standards are a risky combination. The waiter dumped the G&Ts and the bottle of Prosecco unceremoniously on the table, then returned to his position behind the bar. Elbow propped on the counter, face slumped on his hand, his expression that of a semi-comatose hospital patient.

Sometime later and several drinks in, Amy still hasn’t relaxed. She’s fiddling with all the items on the sticky tabletop, lining up the condiments with perfect precision and ensuring all the beer mats sit at right angles to one another. Her facial expression jumps between ‘nervous-but-excited’ one minute, and ‘could be about to throw up’ the next. On the plus side, fuelled by Prosecco, we are flying through our bingo list:

Woman in fabulous make-up wearing shoes that are completely inappropriate for a long-haul flight [tick]
Grubby toddler having a screaming meltdown [poor thing … but tick]
Mortified mother who thinks everyone hates her for travelling with a child [I mean, some people probably do hate her – tick]
Irritatingly glamorous influencer filming a ‘here I am at the airport video’ [several sightings – tick, tick, tick]

It feels like we’ve been at the airport for hours. If it had been up to me, we’d have arrived at the last minute, but Amy insisted on setting off in the middle of the night. My tendency to wing everything makes her nervous; after all, Amy is someone who does meal planning and batch cooking. She makes lists about lists and creates spreadsheets for fun.

‘Oooooh, angry, bald businessman in an ill-fitting suit,’ she yells triumphantly, banging her hand on the table with such force that I spill a glass of fizz over both myself and our passports—a few tables along, the man on the laptop glances around furiously. We stifle our giggles and pretend to be engrossed in The Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok.

The bottle of fizz and the silly game distract us so effectively that I’m shocked when a loudspeaker announcement mentions our flight.

‘Last call for Flight 278 to Singapore from Gate NO.12.’

‘Shit. Shit. Shit,’ I say, gathering our stuff, ‘that’s us. We need to run.’

Over three hours to spare, and we still have a last-minute dash, trying not to trip over ambling passengers or little children straddling ride-on suitcases. Amy is a seasoned runner, pounding the streets whatever the weather, so she hurtles towards the gate sporting an alluring ‘glow.’ By contrast, I am a sweaty, purple heap of a person gasping for breath and clutching my chest dramatically. Is that a stitch? Or worse … an imminent heart attack? Amy glances my way, shaking her head. ‘Stop catastrophising, Bex. There’s nothing wrong; you just need to exercise occasionally.’

In the end, we are the last two people to board the plane. As we rush down the tunnel, Amy grabs my hand and squeezes. ‘This is it, Bex.’ A huge smile spreads across her face at last. ‘Day One of our dream life starts right here.’

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

About Siobhan Murphy –

Siobhan Murphy is a writer and photographer based in the UK. She writes (and reads) both light-hearted romantic comedies and contemporary women’s fiction/Bookclub fiction.

Her writing hours are sponsored by Earl Grey tea, chocolate bars several glasses of wine. When she is not writing, reading, or working in her photography day job, her hobbies are eating haribo sweets, talking nonsense and walking into rooms wondering why she is there.

She loves to travel, laugh at the absurdity of life, and enjoy a glass of wine with good friends. She loves a good TV binge session, especially shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Virgin River, Emily in Paris, or This is Us. She can be an emotional wreck who often runs out of tissues and when she was a child, her dad had to constantly reassure her that programmes on the TV weren’t real. The upside of this is that she can legitimately class her habit of binge-watching RomCom films as ‘research.’

Siobhan loves to escape into books and live in other worlds. Like most writers, she has been an avid reader from the second she hurtled into the world (well perhaps a little bit after that). Over the years she’s drifted around the world in search of adventure, hoping to figure out what to do with her life. She is not sure if she has the answer yet but writing certainly comes close. Though she suspects her long-suffering family, and her liver might not agree.

She’s impulsive and easily bored, so she’s turned her hand to many jobs over the years. She’s worked in places as diverse as the High Commission in Nairobi; a market stall selling cheese in the UK and an 80ft racing yacht in Australia. Been a secondary school English teacher and a Barista with no discernible talent for making coffee. She’s done admin work for a number of businesses but discovered that offices aren’t really for her. Her favourite job was as a bookseller for Waterstones, she loved recommending books to customers and applying those 3 for 2 stickers that people find so hard to remove. For the last 19 years she’s been a professional photographer, taking portraits of humans – often the really, really small ones.

Say hello to Siobhan Murphy via Instagram and Facebook.

The Vision Board was released in 2025. Click to buy on Amazon UK and Amazon US.