A novel by Sergey Alexeev

Safe Return

Name: Safe Return
Author: Sergey Alexeev

At 11.48 pm a youth-service driver presses Yes on a screen that asks whether a child has been handed over. The case turns green. The gate is still swinging.

Read Chapter 1 About the book

Cover of Safe Return by Sergey Alexeev: navy lettering and a moth silhouette on yellow ruled paper

The story

Berrin is a fictional inland New South Wales town: a river, a cotton gin, a closed abattoir, a bowls club turned youth drop-in centre. Mara Bell drives the van that returns young people to safe places. The rules are clear when printed.

The novel follows workers, families and young people whose lives meet around a community youth service. It asks what care, responsibility and accountability look like when institutional procedures meet urgent human needs, and who is left holding the gap between a recorded outcome and what happened.

Safe Return is a completed novel. Chapter 1 is available to read below. Read how the novel came together.

Chapter 1: Porch Light

About the Author

Sergey Alexeev is a health economist, biostatistician and epidemiologist whose work spans health, criminal justice, drug policy and public institutions. He is a Senior Research Associate at UNSW’s Nura Gili Centre for Indigenous Programs and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney’s NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre.

His research covers health, crime, addiction, public policy and service systems, and the evaluation of what programs and policies actually achieve. His academic work appears in journals including Addiction and the Journal of Law and Economics. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Mental Health Systems and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Drug Policy.

Safe Return brings those worlds together in a single story about what happens when institutional records and human lives diverge. Generative AI helped synthesize his research, notes and professional experience and draft the prose, under his direction and with his substantial editing and revision.

Safe Return is a personal creative project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by UNSW or the University of Sydney.

More about his research at alexeev.pw

How the Novel Came Together

Safe Return grew out of my research, publications, research notes and professional experience across Australian health, justice, public policy and community services, including co-design and community-engaged research.

I developed the novel under my creative direction, bringing together observations and material from fields that are usually studied separately. Generative AI tools, including ChatGPT and Claude, helped synthesize this material and assisted with drafting and editing the prose.

I directed the story’s development and undertook substantial editorial review and revision.

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