The Nothing Before New Year
The days between Christmas and New Year's have no names.
Eleven-year-old Eliot knows this now-knows it in the grey light that won't change, in the silence her family can't fill, in the absence of the grandmother who always knew how to turn nothing into something. Grandmother called them the nothing-times, those hollow stretches when the hours blur together and the world forgets how to move. She said they weren't really empty. She said you just had to know how to look.
But Grandmother is gone. And Eliot has stopped looking.
When a mysterious figure appears at her second-story window-standing on nothing but grey December air-Eliot is offered passage to a place that shouldn't exist: the Kingdom of the Lost Hours, built from every moment anyone ever wished away. Towers made of anticipation. Gardens where frozen almost-moments bloom like flowers. Rivers flowing with distilled boredom, beautiful in ways she never imagined.
The Kingdom is breathtaking. It is also a trap.
Because the children who come here don't always leave. They fade-slowly, gently, becoming part of the walls and towers and rivers, dissolving into the beautiful architecture of discarded time. And the Keeper who built this place from centuries of loneliness doesn't know how to love without keeping.
Eliot has until midnight on New Year's Eve to find her way home. But first she needs to understand why her grandmother came to this kingdom sixty years ago-and what she discovered that gave her the strength to leave.
The first book in The Nothing Time Chronicles, this is a story about grief and wonder, about the hours we throw away and the people we carry with us, and about a girl who learns that the only way through the nothing-time is to stop running from it and start filling it with something real.
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