We Were Made in Thursday

Elena Voss misses her train because of a man who cannot decide between a scone and a pain au chocolat.

By the end of that night she has kissed him under a broken streetlight at 23:47. By the next morning he has forgotten her - not the way people forget a face, but completely, cleanly, as if the evening had been lifted out of him.

He forgets her every week. For the better part of a decade, every Thursday, Jude Calvert walks back into Elena's bookshop not knowing her name, and she tells him their story again from the beginning, and he writes it down, and by Friday it is gone. Their love is a day the calendar keeps borrowing and never repays. Only Elena remembers it. Only Elena carries it - through a secret marriage, a child her husband meets off a train each week, a hundred years of family debt running north up the A23, and one failed night at the corner when her hand would not open.

To end it, both of them have to let the day go. And find out whether what is left, once the plot lets go of them, is still love.

We Were Made in Thursday is a tender, strange, deeply British love story about grief, inheritance, and the difference between holding on to someone and being held. For readers of One Day, The Time Traveler's Wife, In Five Years, and The Midnight Library.