Local writer, father and former pastor Dean Cothill will release four books in September, exploring the quieter questions of grief, identity, masculinity, faith and what it means to become more fully alive.
GQEBERHA — Somewhere between raising children, working, travelling, grieving, questioning faith and trying to make sense of an increasingly hurried world, Gqeberha writer Dean Cothill kept writing.
Sometimes it was a few lines late at night.
Sometimes a prayer.
Sometimes a question he could not quite shake.
Over time, those fragments became something larger.
This September, Cothill will release four books together: Poems & Prayers, Between Arrivals and Departures, SOUL: A Small Book of Returning and The Five Questions. The books are being published by Urban Publishing and will be available in paperback, with Kindle editions also planned.
It is an unusual way to enter a publishing season — four books arriving almost at once — but Cothill says that was never really the plan.
“I did not plan to write four books,” he explains on his website.
Instead, the writing emerged from different seasons of his own life: grief, transition, fatherhood, burnout, changing faith, and the slow work of discovering the person underneath the roles we learn to perform.
The result is not really a four-part series.
It is perhaps better understood as four doors into the same house.
Words for when your own words disappear
The first book, Poems & Prayers, is a collection of 53 poems and prayers arranged around four movements: Winter, the Undoing; Spring, the Becoming; Summer, the Burning; and Autumn, the Returning.
It is written particularly for people experiencing grief, tiredness, waiting or seasons when prayer no longer comes easily.
Rather than offering polished answers or traditional devotional writing, the collection attempts to give readers language for the days when they do not have much language of their own.
Cothill describes the pieces as something closer to “field notes from the wilderness”, words shaped in ordinary life, often written after his children had gone to sleep, and born from the conviction that tenderness still has a place in a hard world.
A book for people somewhere in-between
Between Arrivals and Departures turns to another deeply human experience: transition.
Using the imagery of airports, gates, luggage, delays, departures and arrivals, the book explores those strange periods when one chapter of life has ended but whatever comes next has not quite begun.
It is part memoir, part spiritual reflection and part companion for people navigating change, the end of a job, a loss, a move, a changing faith, burnout, grief or simply the unsettling sense that an old version of life no longer fits.
At the heart of the book is a simple idea:
“You are not behind. You are in transit.”
Rather than trying to hurry readers towards closure, Cothill makes a case for learning to inhabit the middle — the unfinished spaces where identity changes, old assumptions loosen and something new begins quietly taking shape.
Who are we beneath all the names?
The third book, SOUL: A Small Book of Returning, asks perhaps the most intimate question of the four:
Who are we when our roles fall away?
Parent.
Professional.
Provider.
Leader.
Believer.
Successful.
Strong.
Useful.
Through seven reflective chapters, SOUL explores the person underneath those identities, particularly for people who have spent years doing what was expected of them only to discover that they have become strangely unfamiliar to themselves.
The book moves through themes including childhood, grief, identity, wisdom and listening, and closes with reflection questions and a year-long listening practice designed to be lived slowly rather than rushed through.
For Cothill, “returning” is not about becoming somebody new so much as learning to recognise the life beneath the life we perform.
Five questions for men who look fine
The fourth book, The Five Questions, turns specifically towards men.
It is written for the man who continues showing up — going to work, paying bills, raising children, meeting deadlines, making jokes, carrying responsibility — while quietly wondering whether something inside him is disappearing.
Rather than another programme for becoming tougher, more productive or more successful, the book offers five questions:
- What am I giving my life to?
- What kind of man am I becoming through my habits?
- Who gets the best of me?
- What am I avoiding?
- If my children became exactly like me, would I be proud?
Each question is accompanied by a practical reflection exercise, with the book moving through subjects including marriage, work, fatherhood, anger, grief, attention, avoidance, repair and legacy.
Its concern is not whether a man appears successful from the outside, but whether he is actually present inside the life he has built.
“Most men do not collapse loudly,” Cothill writes. “They collapse functionally.”
A Gqeberha story supported by readers
There is also something distinctly local about how the books came into being.
Cothill is a Gqeberha-based writer, father and speaker, as well as the founder of the City of Gqeberha platform, which has for several years shared local businesses, events, places and community stories from around Nelson Mandela Bay.
And before the books reached a bookshelf, readers helped make the first print run possible.
A crowdfunding campaign through BackaBuddy reached 100% of its target, allowing the initial collection to move from manuscripts and digital files into physical books.
For a body of work so interested in belonging, perhaps that is fitting.
The books were not created entirely alone.
A community helped carry them across the final threshold.
And while faith is woven throughout Cothill’s writing, these are not books that pretend faith removes uncertainty. Much of the writing occupies the opposite territory: what happens when certainty loosens, when grief changes us, when old answers no longer fit, and when being human requires more honesty than explanation.
There are no neat promises that everything will work out.
There is instead an invitation to pay attention.
To grief.
To the body.
To children.
To questions.
To the ordinary Tuesday.
To the soul beneath all the noise.
Perhaps that is what connects these four very different books.
They are less interested in telling readers how to fix their lives than in helping them notice the life already happening beneath their feet.
The books are due for release now in September 2026, with paperback copies planned for South African readers and Kindle editions internationally. Readers can also sign up for Cothill’s Letters from the Quiet, where he shares occasional essays, poems and prayers.
For more information about Dean Cothill and the four books:
Website: www.deancothill.co.za
Email: dean@deancothill.co.za
Editor’s note: Dean Cothill is the founder and owner of City of Gqeberha. This article is shared as part of our commitment to telling the stories of people creating, building and contributing to life in Nelson Mandela Bay.
