The Ash Years

Venice, 1576. Fifty thousand dead, and only one furnace still hot.Chiara Sperandio has worked her father's glass furnace on Murano since she was fourteen, dressed as a boy, because guild law forbids a woman the pipe. She has one gift no one else has ever had. She can hear glass.When the glasshouse eight doors up burns down and her bankrupt father buys the ashes cheap, the batch comes up singing. There is a dead man in the crucible. He wants somebody to shut a door he left on the latch, and Chiara is the only person alive who can hear him ask.Then the plague arrives, and the Republic denies it for a year while twenty thousand people die. The city burns its dead on an island in the lagoon. A broker who has spent his life selling relics he knows are fake finds a market for glass that empties a room. A corpse-carrier begins deciding which bodies go to Murano and which go into the pit. And a woman of twenty-one works out exactly how much ash a person yields, writes the number down, and does not stop.Fifty years later she is still alive: an old woman in a room above a borrowed furnace, with four hundred and eleven voices in her cupboards, a young Dominican at her table who wants to take them to Rome and have masses said for them, and a fortnight of season left to decide what she owes the dead."Glass keeps what you put in it. That is all glass is."A novel about craft, grief, and the price of being the only one who can hear. For anyone who has wondered what the dead would say if they could be made to.