THE QUIET HOUR

He was a very good athlete. Now he is a caretaker in the hills for three months. Nothing dramatic is going to happen to him, and that turns out to be the point.

Theo Alvarado is twenty-six and out of road. His coaching contract was not renewed, his playing days ended in an injury nobody remembers but him, and in September he drives two hours into the hills to take a job he does not want: three months as caretaker of Lantern House, a shabby, beloved, nearly broke retreat center run by four people who are not, individually, especially holy.

One is bored. One is grieving. One is quietly leaving. One has been there thirty-one years and says almost nothing.

Theo cooks. He fixes gutters and a boiler that has been dying for four years. He drives the van. And week after week he watches other people come up the drive with their lives in pieces - a bereavement weekend, an away-day that goes badly wrong, a silent retreat where nineteen people say nothing for eight days, a week for men just out of prison - and go back down it slightly rearranged, without anyone ever explaining why.

Nobody preaches at him. Nobody tries to fix him. And very slowly, somewhere between the six o'clock silence and the manila card in the boiler room, Theo begins to suspect that he might not be behind after all.

A quiet, warm, deeply readable novel about work, vocation, ordinary faith and the long unglamorous business of staying.

WHAT'S INSIDE

- A retreat house drawn as a real workplace: rotas, broken boilers, budget rows, a trust board saying the word "viability" out loud

- Four staff who are specific, flawed, funny and entirely themselves

- A silent-retreat sequence in which almost nothing is said and a great deal happens

- Guests handled with dignity and in glimpses - nobody in this book exists to teach the hero a lesson

- Faith shown as practice rather than argument: what people do at six in the morning, not what they sign

- No conversion scene, no tidy epiphany, and an ending small enough to fit in a sentence