The Day After Never

"It is only that the large things, it seems, happen to other people."

Maeve is a bookseller in Galway, and she expects nothing more from her life, which is not the same as being unhappy.

The pendant she finds one ordinary Saturday at the market is nothing special. Dull metal, no shine, barely a pattern. The seller won't take money for it. He only wants it gone.

It takes Maeve weeks to understand why.

What she has carried home is not still. It is not lifeless. It speaks to her, courteously, drily, in a voice older than the language it borrows, and it asks for nothing but to be heard. She knows she should be afraid of it. She is not.

What she feels, against every reason she has, is something she had long since stopped expecting: to be met.

And that, she will come to learn, is the more dangerous thing.

A quiet, uncanny novel about solitude, tenderness, and the strange forms that company can take.

For readers of Susanna Clarke and Sarah Perry - where the strange thing is never quite the monster you expect.