The Afterwards House

By Lee Emerick

Maud Applegarth came to Thistledown House to sell it. She stayed because somebody had to remember the cocoa.

Freshly widowed and newly the owner of a crumbling Victorian boarding house she's never seen, Maud expects paperwork, damp, and a quick sale. What she finds is seven tenants who didn't quite finish their stories: a huntsman who can't sleep, a stepsister done playing the villain, a wolf who'd rather grow prize marrows than terrorise anyone, a gingerbread man slowly running out of time, and a goose who pays the rent in solid gold eggs.

Then a damp, meticulous inspector from the Office of Narrative Continuity turns up with thirty days and a clipboard, and the news that every resident must prove they've built a life beyond the page - or be sent back to live their worst moment on a loop, forever, for the sake of a story that was never really about them.

Maud has spent her whole life being sensible on other people's behalf. Now she has one month to fight for a houseful of people who were never supposed to get a second act - and to work out what, exactly, she's been putting off finishing in her own.

The Afterwards House is a cozy, wry, deeply felt fantasy about what comes after "happily ever after," for readers of Legends & Lattes and The House in the Cerulean Sea.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HM74J8B6
• ISBN13: 9798235618909
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Lee Emerick Publishing
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.9" x 5.0"