The Long Kindness

Jo Fenn empties the houses of the dead. She is good at it, and she has one rule that has kept her honest for twenty-one years: everything that comes out of a house goes on the manifest, and the manifest is the truth.

She has nine days to clear a condemned cottage on a collapsing North Sea cliff. On the tenth the machines come, and the house and everything left inside it go into the water.

In the back bedroom there is a shelf. On the shelf there are nine cardboard document boxes, dusted, squared to the edge, numbered in black marker.

Every one of them has her own name on the end, in a stranger's handwriting.

Photographs of her at every age. Her school reports. A hospital wristband with a date three weeks before the birthday she has kept for thirty-nine years. Forty years of small, true, unremarkable things about her life, written down every fortnight by a woman she has never met and is now too late to ask.

Box six is missing.

A fair-play literary mystery about records, consent, and who gets to decide what a person is strong enough to know. There is no villain in it. Everything frightening in this book is a document, a procedure, or somebody being kind.