The Mendery

Nell Barrow spent thirty years bringing down other people's walls.Ninety-two engines. Forty-two walls. Two songs, if you count the songs. She was very good at it, and she never once stayed to see who lived behind the wall afterwards.At fifty-three she buys a shop on a crooked lane in a river town and opens a mending business - the first thing she has ever done that somebody actually wanted done.There is a teapot that remembers a wedding. There is a music box with one wrong note that she refuses to fix. There is a boy who will not leave, a girl of twelve who asks better questions than anyone in the town, a glassblower on the point who does not need help, and something living under the workbench that steals screws and gives nothing back.And there is an ordinance, and a licence sold by a man who had no right to sell it, and a letter to a magistrate written in a practised hand.A quiet novel about second lives, small towns, and the part of the work nobody stays for.