The night it fell, no one had a word for the way it was falling.

Five thousand years later a trunk arrives in an emptied Edinburgh flat. Inside it: a stone that is warm in the cold, and a dead woman's journal addressed forward in time.

Ailsa Kennedy is twenty-seven, newly alone, and down to her last two hundred pounds. Her life has been folded away into eleven boxes, and most of them are half empty. Then her grandmother's trunk comes south from Orkney, and with it an errand that makes no sense. Take it back to where it began. Before the year turns.

So she does the one unreasonable thing left to her. She goes north.

What follows is a journey up the holy edges of Scotland: stone circles that still keep the moon's appointments after five thousand years, chambered dark aimed at the midwinter sun, islands where the old words are still warm, and a whirlpool that turns like a slow god. At every threshold something is waiting for her. It never explains. It only shows her what she could not see alone, handing back, one recognition at a time, the life she gave away to keep everyone else comfortable.

By the road's end she will understand what her grandmother's line of women have always known: what is kept, keeps you.

And the last door in this book opens onto whoever is holding it.

A novel of grief, inheritance and the getting back of a voice, set among the true ancient places of Scotland, for readers of The Alchemist, The Midnight Library and The Salt Path.