Some things find their own way home.

On a working farm where the days start before the alarm, a boy named Jude takes on a job no one asked him to: keeping a newborn calf alive. He names him Neil. He warms the bottles, learns the weight of a living thing that depends on him, and—without quite meaning to—gives his whole heart to an animal a farm was never going to let him keep.

Then Neil is gone. And the counting begins.

Neil the Veal is a tender middle‑grade novel about love that doesn't check whether it's allowed, about the quiet economics of a family farm, and about the eighty‑three days a boy carries a hope he isn't sure he's permitted to have. Told in spare, luminous prose, it's a story for any reader who has ever loved something they couldn't hold onto—and hoped, against the arithmetic, that it might come back.

Every copy comes with an original song written for the book.