The Toast Maker

The rain had been falling all afternoon when the knock came at Elder Cottage.

Iris Harland came to Little Darlow looking for quiet. After years of a life that had grown too loud, she wanted a small cottage, a kettle, a cat, and the kind of solitude that didn't need explaining. What she found instead was a village that had decided - gently, without consultation - that she belonged to them.

There is Arthur Pritchard, her elderly neighbour, who returns a misdelivered envelope and stays for toast and stories of his late wife Mary. There is Tom Avery, the local handyman with paint in his hair and a plaster on his thumb, who comes to mend her leaning back fence and stays for breakfast. There is Moss the cat, judging everyone from the windowsill, and a chicken-decorated tin full of Mrs Halloway's marmalade recipes - a kitchen inheritance from the woman who lived in the cottage before.

Over one slow autumn of fence posts and power cuts, November pansies and harvest festivals, Iris finds her quiet life filling with people. A jar of plum jam from Lorna at the post office. A WhatsApp group called fence watch. A first kiss on the old railway path. And, when Tom's roof finally gives in beneath the winter rain, a question she never imagined herself asking: would he like to stay in the spare room?

The Toast Maker is a tender, slow-burning novel about the small mercies of village life - about marmalade and umbrellas and leaning gates, and the way a house, given time and a little buttered bread, learns to call you home.