You are exhausted. Your mind has other plans.
Bedtime Stories for Adults Who Need Them is a collection of ten quiet stories written for the hour when sleep won't come - for anxious minds that won't slow down, for the particular loneliness of 3 a.m., for anyone who has ever lain awake staring at the ceiling while the day replays itself on loop.
These are not stories with lessons or tidy endings. They are stories that slow as they go: a station porter who has spent thirty-one years noticing everything everyone else walks past. A twelve-year-old who lights a candle at the end of a dock every summer for a mother she's still learning how to miss. A cartographer who spends eleven years mapping the night itself, and the people who live in it. A beekeeper's granddaughter who arrives at a farm with the wrong bag and leaves with something she didn't know she needed.
Each story has been written the way sleep works - not with a destination, but with a direction. Downward. Inward. Slow.
If you fall asleep before the last page, you have done exactly the right thing.
For readers of Katherine May's Wintering and Kathryn Nicolai's Nothing Much Happens.