This Ordinary Light is the second draft of a fictional novel. It tells the story of Ella, who finds herself institutionalised for alcohol dependency and psychological issues. There she meets Richard, a psychiatrist, who is carrying his own unimaginable grief. As Ella’s treatment unfolds, the boundaries of their respective realities are challenged and the roles of saviour and savee are blurred. At first, Richard is arrogant in his belief that Ella’s case is as mundane as all the others he has dealt with, but as he is increasingly unravelled by the circumstances of his own life, he realises he needs her story to be real. It is written as a multiple first-person point of view narrative and follows a helical structure. It aims to explore ideas surrounding mental illness, the supernatural world, our perceptions about what is ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ and the stories we create for ourselves in order to survive. The exegesis further explores these themes in the context of intertextuality, magical realism, the concept of myth in a modern setting and the embedding of the magical/supernatural within the (seemingly) mundane.