Dry

Clara Rendle is thirty-eight, an architect, and tired. Her oldest friend gives her a fortnight's rest at a place called Fallow.

In Rotterdam she meets a water engineer who argues with her about lime. Her business partner walks out with her biggest client. She has a daughter who draws tram maps of cities she has invented, and a son who keeps a rain gauge on the balcony and reports the millimetres every morning like news. A vault falls in Naples. She builds a room in which nothing is required of anyone, and finds she cannot sit in it.

Dry is a novel about appetite, attention and grief: about the things we build, the people we keep, and what an ordinary afternoon is worth.