The Kingdom of Lost Hours

The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve have no names.

Eliot knows this because she's been lying on her bed for three of them, unable to tell one grey afternoon from the next. Her grandmother is dead. Her mother washes dishes that don't need washing. Her father fixes things that aren't broken. And the nothing-time, the empty stretch of hours between one year and the next, has swallowed their house whole.

Then something taps on her second-floor window. And a flickering figure, standing on the grey December air, asks her to come and see what happens to all the hours people wish away.

What Eliot finds is a kingdom built from lost time, ruled by a being so lonely it has spent centuries collecting children who wander into the gaps in the calendar. The kingdom is beautiful. It is also consuming the children who live there, dissolving them into the architecture of their own discarded hours. And Eliot's grandmother walked these same streets sixty years ago and found something in the deepest dark that changed her forever.

To save the fading children, to understand what her grandmother couldn't tell her, and to find her way home before midnight on New Year's Eve, Eliot will have to go deeper into the lost hours than anyone has gone before, to the place where unwanted time collects and pain has a voice, and learn the hardest lesson the nothing-time has to teach: that the hours you most want to escape are the ones that matter most.

The Kingdom of Lost Hours is a middle grade dark fantasy about grief, presence, and the courage it takes to sit with the people you love in the moments that hurt.