Louisa James

Early draft

The Quiet Hours

When Mara Ellwood returns to Leeds to clear her late mother's flat, she finds a box of unsent letters and a set of notebooks that suggest her mother had been quietly rewriting the family history for years. As Mara tries to decide what to keep, what to destroy, and what to ask the living before it is too late, the flat becomes a place where old loyalties and private failures are harder to ignore. The novel follows the awkward, ordinary work of facing what a family has left unsaid.