Six short stories. Six moments from childhood that stayed.
A boy and his best friend build a treehouse from scrap wood and summer afternoons. A girl trades a glittery dolphin sticker for a baseball card and something harder to name. A brother passes down a mixtape the way you pass down something you've outgrown but can't throw away. A boy waits by a dead arcade cabinet in a blackout, eating butterscotch candy in the dark. Saturday morning cartoons. A bedroom being packed up, box by box, poster by poster, until only the pale squares on the wall are left.
The Kept Things is a collection of nostalgic short stories about the ordinary hours of childhood — the ones that felt small at the time and turned out to be everything.
Perfect for fans of: literary short fiction, coming-of-age stories, nostalgic audiobooks, cozy listening, quiet literary fiction, slice-of-life storytelling, childhood memoir, 1980s nostalgia, emotional short stories, heartfelt fiction.
Clara Bennett grew up in the kind of town where the hardware store knew your name and the rink smelled like popcorn every Friday night. She writes cozy literary fiction about ordinary people finding their footing in small communities — the kitchen rituals, the borrowed keys, the slow accumulation of belonging.
When she is not writing, Clara can be found haunting used record shops, making unnecessarily elaborate mixtapes, and drinking tea that has steeped about four minutes too long.
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