The Boat We Built in Winter
One winter. Thirty-two feet of Cornish elm. Six oars, and one of them missing.
Merryn Kitto has kept her late father's boatyard going alone for eighteen months, on stubbornness and very little else. So when Polgarrow brings back its regatta for the first time in thirty years, she does the only thing she can think of to save the yard: she offers to build the town a gig, over one winter, with anyone who'll turn up on a Thursday night to help.
Two people turn up. One is twelve-year-old Barney Avery, who doesn't say much and turns out to have the best hands she has ever seen. The other is his father, Sol, the town's new doctor, a widower who came to the shed to sign a form and has no intention of picking up a plane.
A boy who has stopped talking about his mother. A man who has forgotten how to want anything. A woman who has never once left the harbour she was born in. And a town that still remembers the night in 1996 when a Kitto gig came home one oar short.
A warm, closed-door romance about grief, boats and starting again, from the author of The Year the Swallows Came Back.
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