MENDING & MARMALADE: A Cozy Fantasy of Small Repairs, Gentle Magic, and Found Family: 1

Forty-one broken things. Forty-one names. One mender who has never stayed anywhere long enough to be missed. Ilsa Brannock is fifty-two years old, very good at mending things, and has left eleven towns without anybody noticing she was gone. So when a solicitor's letter tells her that a man she met exactly once - forty years ago, when she was ten - has died and left her his shop in the valley village of Thimbleford, she goes mostly to find out why. What she finds is a shop with the kettle still warm, a fat gold moth asleep in the button drawer, and a back room full of other people's broken belongings. Forty-one of them. Each tagged with a name in a careful old hand. Each carried in years ago by somebody in the village, and not one of them ever finished. There is a cracked butter dish belonging to a woman who has not spoken to her sister in eleven years. A fiddle with no name on the tag that the whole valley goes quiet about. A wedding quilt that two people would rather she left alone. And Ilsa cannot open her door for new business until that shelf is clear - which means knocking on forty-one doors and asking forty-one people what happened. For a woman whose entire life's practice is leaving before anyone asks her anything, that is the hardest work there is. A cozy fantasy about small repairs, gentle magic, and the terrible danger of being expected somewhere. - A village you would move into tomorrow, and a mending shop you can smell - A found family worth staying for - a grumpy cooper, an apprentice who simply turned up, a stonemason who breaks one teapot a week - Gentle, domestic magic with an honest cost, paid in tea, toast and marmalade - A competent, middle-aged heroine who is thoroughly done with quests - A sweet, slow-burn, closed-door romance between two people in their fifties - No villain. No peril. Nothing worse than a woman apologising badly in the street - Recipes at the back