The Life Impossible

Grace Winters is seventy-two, a retired maths teacher living a quiet, grief-narrowed life in Lincolnshire after losing her husband and, years before that, her young son.

When she learns that a former colleague, Christina van der Berg, has died on the Spanish island of Ibiza and left her a house there, Grace has little reason to stay behind, and travels out to settle the estate.

What she finds is stranger than she expected: a mystery around Christina's death, and a force in the sea and land that begins to change how Grace sees the world, and herself.

Written as a series of emails to her former student Maurice Augustine, Grace's account traces a late-life awakening — one that puts her at odds with a property developer intent on remaking the island for profit. From the author of The Midnight Library, this is a novel about grief, wonder, and the possibility of change at any age.