10 October, 2026 — Waiheke Island, New Zealand
People Like You is an interlinked work of literary autofiction, which follows six women across two decades to interrogate identity and the restless business of becoming.
Six lives. Twelve moments. A phrase that keeps returning to mark the brittle architecture of class, belonging and shame. People like us.
The novel moves briskly and without apology from courtroom corridors to teenage rooms, from hospital wards to cramped family kitchens, from a flat in London to a room in Rome, a small Eastern European town and a windswept island off New Zealand’s northern shore.
Each woman appears twice, as a young adult at a hinge moment, and later, years on, when memory and consequence have reshaped the self. A criminal defence lawyer carries a private fracture behind professional composure. A young woman who once wanted to teach remakes herself abroad. Another lives with an unnamed guilt that warps her choices. A mother’s anxious thoughts spiral toward catastrophe; an ageing woman stands face-to-face with mortality and the sediment of memory. The stories do not converge by coincidence but by inheritance.
The book ends with a granddaughter finding the notebooks that record these lives, and in that discovery private fragments become a shared legacy.
People Like You keeps its contradictions intact. It is a book of betrayals and long reckonings, of women negotiating roles shaped by cultural expectations and family loyalties. It treats motherhood, old age and companionship, without sentimentality, precisely, unsparingly. The refrain throughout the book, ‘people like us’, marks the line language draws. It decides who moves forward and who stays behind. It names the everyday injuries we learn to accept.
WHY THIS BOOK?
Six intimate portraits across two life stages trace the shifts and continuities of a life, giving a layered portrait of how change happens. It is a sustained probe of cultural inheritance, anchored by a recurring phrase that both names and narrows identity. A narrative that moves through legal, domestic, and foreign streets, mapping the geographies of fate. An unflinching account of motherhood, ageing and long partnership, offered without softening or myth. A multigenerational coda that recasts memory as inheritance, not loss.
This is a book for readers of character-led autofiction. Those drawn to the slow, exacting work of memory and reinvention, People Like You lays out six intertwined investigations of what we carry and what we relinquish. If we can.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
I was born in 1976, in former Czechoslovakia. Discontented with my world shaping in Orwell’s 1984 vision, I left in 1995, eventually settling in London. I learned English as an au-pair and later studied law while a trainee in a city law firm. My academic journey continued with Masters with Merit in Classical History and later, Social Sciences. I am a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. I am a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. I am professionally active in London, UK and in New Zealand.
Book Name: People Like You
Author Name: Monika Killeen
ISBN Number: 979-8951966087
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