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Some things break clean. Others break along a seam - and that's where the mending starts.
The Broken Seam is the story of a man rebuilding a life from the ground up: marriage, faith, fatherhood, and a sense of self that had to be re-engineered from broken parts. Told with the precision of a blueprint and the honesty of a confession, this memoir traces what it means to survive - not just the crisis itself, but the long, unglamorous work of recovery that comes after.
Drawing on Christian faith and hard-won clarity, James Wade writes about the moments most people hide: the failures, the reckonings, the slow rebuilding of trust with a wife who stayed, and the responsibility of raising five children while still learning how to stand on his own. This isn't a story about being fixed. It's about learning to live inside the repair.
The Broken Seam is Book 1 in a seven-part memoir series that reads like a life laid open - structural, unflinching, and ultimately hopeful.
James Wade
James Wade was awarded the 2026 Dobie Paisano Fellow from the University of Texas at Austin, the 2026 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Novel, and is the youngest novelist to win two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. He also received the MPIBA's prestigious Reading the West Award, and his debut novel, All Things Left Wild, was listed as one of the most influential Westerns of the twenty-first century. Beasts of the Earth was named a Best Book of 2022 by both Deep South Magazine and The Southern Review of Books. James is a four-time finalist for the Austin Chronicle's Best Writer in Austin award, and his nonfiction work has appeared in Texas Highways and Writer's Digest, among others. James was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2026. He lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and children.
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