Half My Name Is Fiction

In a fog-shrouded bookshop on Pilgrim's Lane, Vera Lockhart slides a worn paperback into place and tries not to think about the past. The Bristol Channel fog has a way of softening the edges of things, and of bringing them back into unwelcome focus. The Lockharts are a family built on careful silences. Vera tends the books; her siblings Eitan, Margot, and Daniel have scattered to quieter lives. But when Cassiel Thorne, an old acquaintance carrying more questions than answers, arrives bearing a manuscript that confesses half the family's deepest secrets and invents the rest, the old agreements begin to crumble. Anne-Marguerite's name resurfaces in the margins. Helena Asher reopens an old wound. Beatrice Vance, Phoebe Saavedra, Imogen Frey, Lyle Caine, and Hannah Beaumont-Vance all arrive on Pilgrim's Lane with something to gain from what happens next, and something to lose if the wrong page is read aloud. With each revelation, Vera must decide whether the fictions that have held her family together were protection or betrayal, and whether the truth, once finally spoken, can ever be put back on the shelf.