THE LAST TELLING

The library in Bellhollow, North Carolina closes on June thirtieth. Twelve-year-old Jonah Teague hasn't set foot in it since March — since the morning he found his mother on the kitchen floor, and since the composition notebook she was writing just for him stopped in the middle of a sentence on page forty-one.

Then a book comes back through the return slot that nobody checked out. The card inside the cover is signed in his mother's handwriting, dated three weeks after they buried her. Behind a wall in the library basement there is a door. Behind the door is Eldermere — a country built out of every story anybody in the world ever finished telling. It is dying.

The boy who opened that door sixty years ago never came home. He is still fourteen years old, and he can offer a grieving boy the one thing nobody else in two worlds can: his mother, whole, exactly as she was, for as long as he wants her. The price is the ending.

A standalone novel — a prologue, sixty-six chapters and an epilogue in five parts — about grief, memory, and the hardest mercy there is: letting a story finish.