Scripta Manent

If it isn't in writing, it doesn't exist.

Maren Hale drafts contracts in London for a living, and she learned that rule long before law school. She learned it from her grandfather.

Tobias Hale ran the letterpress print shop on the harbour at Kinbrae, in the East Neuk of Fife. He was the most generous man in the town, provided all you needed from him was a promise. He told a widow he would print her late husband's poems. He told a schoolboy there would be an apprenticeship waiting for him. He told Maren, again and again, that he would be there.

When he dies, she comes home to sell.

The shop is failing, the developer buying up the harbour row has a generous offer and a warm handshake, and Maren has a partnership review waiting for her in London. All she has to do is clear out the flat, settle the estate, and politely explain to half the town why an old man's kind words were never worth anything.

Then, behind the presses, she finds a rack with two locked doors.

Inside are forty-three formes of hand-set metal type, each one tagged with a name and a year, each one composed backwards in lead, locked up, and never printed. Her grandfather's words were never lost. They were waiting.

The only way to read them is to print them.

Scripta Manent is a warm, exact and unsentimental novel about grief, inheritance, small towns, and the difference between keeping your word and finally writing it down. From the author of What Was Left Behind and The Last Ward.