Domestic abuse, Loving The Brothers & Sisters

By: Staff Writer

January 6, 2023

A United Kingdom based author, with roots in Barbados, penned her first book series about the experiences of Black women who have lived through domestic abuse and the probation system and have survived.

Pamela Haynes, finished her first book, “Loving The Brothers,” in 2018 and spoke to Caribbean Magazine Plus about the release of the sequel, “Loving The Sisters.” She said: “I decided to write a fiction piece about three women who meet a set of brothers called the Morgan brothers. Life isn’t quite what it seems and the women plot to leave the brothers on the same day. So Loving The Brothers is the first part one, where you meet the characters. Book Two was published on July 27 last year, I managed to secure a three book publishing deal with a small press in the US and they also gave me the opportunity to rewrite Loving the Brothers where I added three more additional chapters to the second edition and it’s going really well.”

Loving The Sisters, a sequel to her first novel Loving The Brothers which was published in 2018. In Part 2 of the story, Patti, Charmaine and Rose form an alliance in Jamaica and agree to support each other when they return to the UK. But with warnings from celestial beings and Veronica dreaming about ‘fish’, the women experience doubts.

Loving The Sisters is about Love, Sisterhood and Loyalty. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the different forms of domestic abuse and the role the probation service plays in safeguarding victims of abuse.

There is a part three in the making, “Loving The Children,” which Pamela hopes will be released by this summer after she gets the manuscript off to the publisher.

Writing a book was always on her bucket list of things to accomplish in life along with going on a cruise and doing my Master’s degree, Pamela shared. “But all of these things cost money.” Pamela had the fortune of running into a book publisher at an event she attended with a friend and it all started to come together for her book at that one chance event.

“She had her book on the table, and we were talking and I said, ‘Oh, one day, I want to write a book,’ and she said, ‘Well, I’m moving into publishing, let’s talk,’ and she drove me over the next two years so she acted as my book mentor.

“The whole thing was new to me and she took me through the whole the whole process until I published a book in 2018. So I’ve learned so much along the way and I’ve had so many opportunities to do other things as well.”

A whole new world opened up for this former probation officer turned author, where she was able to go to conferences, attend seminars, visit other countries and be invited as a guest on several talk shows from the UK to Barbados and has even served as a judge to a beauty pageant.

In fact, her experiences as a probation officer and a “domestic abuse facilitator” in the UK, opened her eyes to the world of the marginalized and those who needed to get their stories out in some way, shape or form.

Pamela said: “I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’m a very avid reader, and I admire authors quite a bit.

“I was approaching a milestone birthday and I decided right now is the time to get this book done. So I worked in the criminal justice system for over 30 years in the UK, partly as working for the Crown Prosecution Service, but I also worked for the probation service as well.”

Noting that there isn’t a lot of literature out there about the times in the probation service, but rather the focus has historical been about crime, criminals and the the police. “They don’t write about the work that the probation service does, I knew that whatever I did I wanted to put the probation service at the heart of my stories. Because I do believe that we are superheroes too and we just can’t talk about our work the way criminal justice agencies do. I was a domestic abuse facilitator and I worked with offenders who were sentenced by the courts and completed a domestic abuse programme,” Pamela said.

Loving The Brothers series is a peculiar name for the start of a book series that had its origins in the criminal justice system. “That title came to me about 20 years ago and I have sat on this dream of writing a book for over 20 years. I don’t know where the title has come from, but one of my characters does say that ‘loving these brothers isn’t easy,’ and sometimes we find it hard to love the brothers,” Pamela said.

She added: “So that’s where I got Loving The Brothers from and Loving The Sisters just happened to be a natural way to go with the book and Loving The Children is about the impact of domestic abuse on children, even the unborn child, which is the bit that I’m writing about at the moment.”

Loving The Brothers and Loving The Sisters are available on Amazon in hard cover, paperback and for Kindle.