William Gomes

A child saw something in the rain. The town remembered it differently.When Mina Ford arrives in a quiet English town, she comes with one task: to examine an old witness account from the night a man drowned by the cut. The official story has long been settled. A young passer-by saw a man making...

Two kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a research station is failing. One engineer remains inside, keeping its last living systems alive. When a structural failure tears through Erebus Deep Station, Priya Okonkwo is forced to seal a flooding bulkhead.

A deeply moving contemporary literary novel about illness, grief, invisible labour, migration, dignity and the long wait to be properly seen. Abdul Matin Choudhury has spent much of his life cleaning the rooms other people pass through: school corridors, hospital wards, staff toilets, waiting...

A deeply humane contemporary literary novel about displacement, welcome, loss, listening and the fragile moments in which home briefly appears. In a Meeting House in West Yorkshire, a room is booked under the name of a harmless thing: Community listening, Tuesday evenings, six-thirty to eight...

In the rain-darkened nave of an old cathedral foundation, the music is still beautiful. But beneath the beauty lies a silence that has been carefully preserved.

A powerful contemporary British literary novel about autism, school, family love, SEND systems, safeguarding pressure and the moment a child stops being believed. Sarah and Daniel know the morning is wrong before the kettle clicks off.

London, November 1956. A message has been sent four minutes before anyone asked for it.In a departmental review room, Eleanor Vane spends her days among the paper remnants of other people's decisions: cable traffic, routing slips, carbon copies and files that have passed through too many hands...

A quietly devastating literary mystery about family, mourning, hidden letters and the names left behind after a death.

Before the file, before the finding, before the apology, there was a child who should have been heard.

A family came to court to discover how their daughter died. Before the inquest is over, another person will be dead. Sixteen-year-old Riya Kabir dies while detained in a mental health unit. Eighteen months later, her parents are still waiting for answers.

On Calder’s Reach, a certified figure determines who receives water and who goes thirsty.Hydrographer Selby Arden has built her life around the belief that measurements cannot lie. But when the figure she certifies triggers a severe ration cut in the outer townships, she returns to the raw...

When the water rises, the truth does not disappear. It waits to be recorded. In the coastal town of Harwick, the Tidefields estate was sold as secure, protected by a flood defence promised to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years. Then the water comes.

A tender and atmospheric literary novel about family, memory, grief, inheritance and the fragile places that hold a community together. When Mina Rajan returns to her late father’s corner shop, she expects a list, not a life. Rajan Stores has always been more than shelves and stock. It is the...

At St Bartholomew’s House, old books are not only preserved. They are arranged, displayed, inherited, and made to tell the stories powerful people need them to tell. Leila Rahman, a careful and exacting provenance librarian, has spent her career correcting the record quietly.

A sealed flat. Three open doors. A dead man who never left anything open by accident. When facilities manager Samira Rahman is sent to clear the apartment of Henrik Vos, she expects an ordinary death and a routine handover. Instead, she finds three internal doors standing ajar inside a home that...

Some cities bury their mistakes beneath paperwork. Caldmouth buried an entire street beneath the ground. When a winter surge tears through the Marsh Quarter, city cartographer Mara Vey is called to redraw the flood-risk map of a town built on reclaimed land.

A powerful contemporary literary novel about return, revolution, inheritance, memory and the fragile work of founding a country for the second time.Ali Abbasi returns to Dhaka from abroad carrying a wrapped Quran, a rejected paper, a suitcase of old arguments and the accusation of having watched...

NO BODY AT LOW TIDEThe water has gone out farther than anyone expected. When Eleri Marsh returns to the coastal town of Porth Carreg after her mother's death, she plans to spend a few quiet weeks clearing the family home and putting the past to rest. Instead, she finds a question nobody wants asked.

A profound contemporary literary novel about grief, faith, justice, memory and the difficult, unfashionable work of forgiveness. Before Elias Khoury became a case, he was a boy in an Ealing kitchen. He ate kibbeh with his family. He corrected his father’s English. He dried the dishes. He sang...

A powerful contemporary British literary novel about asylum, disability, welfare, policy, housing, protest, public systems and the quiet violence of official language. On paper, there was a process. Yasmin Hussain knows that an asylum file does not move like a path. A missed call can become a...