It begins with a four-year-old girl, alone in a hospital room, watching her mother walk past the window without looking in.

She waits. Her mother doesn’t come back.

That moment lasts thirty years.

Namaste, Pricks is the story of what happens when a single childhood wound – small, unwitnessed, never spoken about – quietly architects a whole life. It follows Nikki Williams from the suburbs of Melbourne through two secret pregnancies, a decade of drug and alcohol indulgence, a series of relationships that all carry the same fingerprint, a van, a breakdown and eventually a yoga mat in Bali.

With disarming honesty and a voice that is equally capable of making you laugh out loud and stopping you cold, Williams traces the invisible thread connecting her earliest experiences of abandonment to the patterns that followed her into adulthood: the hunger for connection, the compulsion toward unavailable people, the instinct to carry everything alone and call it strength. She writes about addiction without self-pity, about placing two daughters up for adoption with clarity and love that is quietly devastating and about the long, unglamorous, occasionally hilarious work of learning to inhabit your own life.

This is not a book about yoga. It is a book about what yoga gave one woman access to – her own body, her own history and for the first time her own emotional voice.

Funny, raw and deeply human, Namaste, Pricks asks what it costs to survive your own childhood and what it takes – decades later in a trip around the world, in a therapist’s office, in the throes of same sex relationships – to finally stop and consider.