Spine

Every house in the city has a grey box that listens. Tom Calder's daughter talked to hers every night of her life.

Tom is a bookbinder. With his thumb on a spine he can tell whether a book has been loved, and how, and by whom. He mends what can be mended and tells people the truth about the rest.

Then Isla dies, six years old, of an ordinary fever on an ordinary day, and Tom does what a binder does with a thing too far gone to save. He gathers every piece that is left. The boxes heard her all her life. They kept her voice, her songs, the word she always said wrong. Six of them on a bench, and a little work, and she might say goodnight again.

But every voice in the city has started to come back a hair late, as if something else were listening first. A coast is missing from the map. Things are being kept that should have been let go. And somewhere above it all, on a shelf no one built, among rows of worlds bound like books, one has just gone dark.

Spine is the first book of the Unread trilogy: a novel about grief, attention, and the terrible tenderness of not letting go.