Every Name Is Hers

Paul Whitlow is fifty-four, a widowed boatbuilder with a cancer nobody can name and about three months to live. His oncologist, Neal Ford, is thirty-seven. But Paul has seen his face before. In family photographs from 1898, 1915 and 1926, the same young man stands at the edge of weddings and funerals, not a day older.

“I was your grandfather,” Neal tells him. “Not the one you’re thinking of.”

Every time Neal dies, he wakes at dawn on the same freezing shore of a Himalayan river, eighteen again, wearing the wool shirt his first wife made for him five thousand years ago. He remembers every life. He has never understood why he comes back.

Now, with little time left, Paul wants to hear the stories. His daughter Clara, a solicitor, wants proof no con man could fake. His son Daniel keeps count of the deaths. Eight-year-old Ellie writes everything down in a notebook called TRUE STORIES.

So Neal tells them about the Indian sailor who became a Portsmouth shipbuilder in 1761; the river trader who buried his fortune beside a striped rock; the soldier who spent three lifetimes destroying a kingdom; and the storyteller whose only crime was telling the truth. Some stories make them laugh. Others are harder to tell.

Then a dam threatens the Himalayan river where every one of Neal’s lives has begun. He takes Paul and his family to India, to the shore itself, to tell them the story he has saved for last. The story of a young farmer, a shirt tied with a knot, and the woman who made it.

Funny to hear and painful to tell, Every Name Is Hers is a novel about five thousand years of borrowed names, the families we leave behind, and the people who choose to wait for us. The first book in The Shore, a five-book series, with a complete story of its own.