Lanhydrock House appears briefly in this book: it was written before I worked there in summer 2021, but I was able to change details during copy-edits to reflect my experience. Thanks to all my fabulous Lanhydrock colleagues (Gabrielle, Donna, Richard, Laurence and the whole team) for an incredible three months and for giving me an insight into what it’s like working somewhere so inspiring.

Finally, eternal thank-yous to everyone at home: to Craig for everything from early-morning coffee to reading each draft and reassuring me at every stage; to Gabe, Seb, Lottie, Charlie and Alfie for reminding me that there’s a world beyond the page in front of me; and to all my friends and family, for everything.

Read on for an extract from …

The air is running out. We think there’s less than a year of it. We are the last humans.

What do we do?

Make a list.

Heal rifts.

Do the things that scare us.

12 December

You know when you worry about everything all the time? Sometimes it turns out that it’s the thing you haven’t bothered to think about – the thing that’s too outlandish, even for you – that turns out to be the one that’s going to get you. That was what happened that day.

It was a cold afternoon, a Thursday. There was a Christmas party going on at college and everyone else was there. I never went to parties, so I had slipped out of the building and melted away (knowing no one would notice), and now I was walking round the park to kill time. Mum worked at home, and I didn’t want to see the pity and frustration on her face when she realized I hadn’t gone to the Christmas thing. I was planning to wait it out for a bit and then pretend I’d had a lovely time.

The grass was still crunchy underfoot in the shade. I crisscrossed the park to stomp on the crispest leaves, telling myself that I would need to be braver than this in future, because I had promised myself I would audition for the play, and a girl who couldn’t walk into a dining hall to eat a handful of Quality Street and listen to the student choir singing ‘Jingle Bells’ wasn’t going to be very good at standing on a stage and declaiming Shakespeare.

Whenever my stomping took me close to the children’s playground I looked at the toddlers running and climbing and tried to remember if I had ever felt so carefree and un-self-conscious.

I wished afterwards that I could go back and recapture that ordinary boredom and mild self-loathing, but it turned out that nothing feels the same when all your assumptions about what might happen next have been ripped away, and you’ve discovered you don’t have a future at all.