Mending & Marmalade : A Cozy Fantasy of Small Repairs, Gentle Magic, and Found Family
Overview
Forty-one broken things. Forty-one names. One mender who has never stayed anywhere long enough to be missed.
Ilsa Brannock is fifty-two years old, very good at mending things, and has left eleven towns without anybody noticing she was gone. So when a solicitor's letter tells her that a man she met exactly once - forty years ago, when she was ten - has died and left her his shop in the valley village of Thimbleford, she goes mostly to find out why.
What she finds is a shop with the kettle still warm, a fat gold moth asleep in the button drawer, and a back room full of other people's broken belongings. Forty-one of them. Each tagged with a name in a careful old hand. Each carried in years ago by somebody in the village, and not one of them ever finished.
There is a cracked butter dish belonging to a woman who has not spoken to her sister in eleven years. A fiddle with no name on the tag that the whole valley goes quiet about. A wedding quilt that two people would rather she left alone.
And Ilsa cannot open her door for new business until that shelf is clear - which means knocking on forty-one doors and asking forty-one people what happened.
For a woman whose entire life's practice is leaving before anyone asks her anything, that is the hardest work there is.
A cozy fantasy about small repairs, gentle magic, and the terrible danger of being expected somewhere.
- A village you would move into tomorrow, and a mending shop you can smell
- A found family worth staying for - a grumpy cooper, an apprentice who simply turned up, a stonemason who breaks one teapot a week
- Gentle, domestic magic with an honest cost, paid in tea, toast and marmalade
- A competent, middle-aged heroine who is thoroughly done with quests
- A sweet, slow-burn, closed-door romance between two people in their fifties
- No villain. No peril. Nothing worse than a woman apologising badly in the street
- Recipes at the back
This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798192188033
- ISBN-10: 9798192188033
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: August 2026
- Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.73 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.77 pounds
- Page Count: 352
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