Clara Finch has spent six years keeping other people's records in order. Precise, thorough, excellent — three words never once accompanied by the word warm. When her role is made redundant, she does what she always does: notes it, files it, takes action.
The action turns out to be a listing on an archivists' listserv, placed by an elderly bookseller in coastal Devon who signs himself H.Q. and mentions, almost as an afterthought, that there is also a cat.
Before the Cove is the story of what happens in the weeks before Clara arrives in Shell Cove — the conference room she couldn't identify, the forty-seven documents she kept when she was told not to, and the lighthouse that appeared gradually and then all at once.
It is a story about what we keep, what we leave behind, and the moment you stop mistaking order for meaning.
For readers of the Shell Cove series, it is the beginning. For anyone who has ever kept a thing they were told to throw away — it might feel rather familiar.
