The Returned Book

Some overdue books are not late. They are waiting.

In the rain-lashed coastal town of St Jude's, librarian and paper conservator Mara Singh spends her days repairing damaged books and keeping order inside an old library built over sealed flood tunnels and forgotten archive rooms.

Then, after midnight, a sealed returns chute opens and delivers a long-lost copy of The Woman in White borrowed by Alice Prowse, a woman who has been dead for six years.

When Mara opens the book, she discovers the impossible: certain overdue books borrowed by the dead can open into the final seven days of their lives. Alice died alone. Mara tells herself that changing one small thing, one old friendship, one final act of kindness, cannot do much harm.

But the library keeps records of every mercy. Photographs alter. Memories shift. Her daughter Ivy begins remembering a past she never lived, and Mara loses one of her own memories as payment.

The Returned Book is Book One of The Library of Last Chances, an atmospheric gothic fantasy series about grief, motherhood, memory, family secrets, and the dangerous hope that the past might still be repaired.