Excerpt from Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But I did it once. Just when things were starting to slip from my grasp and it was the only way to hold on. Such a long time ago. When all I had to worry about was a mother losing her mind.

There's a joke in there somewhere.

Even though I've got endless hours stretching out in front of me I don't write because I can't. I get my laptop out. Click the dart of the mouse around the screen. Check the news. Bad things happening everywhere. Then a bit of light relief. A parrot has been removed from display at a shop for swearing at customers. This is the kind of article they write to stop everyone losing their minds at the horror of it all. I sometimes wonder if these articles are a kind of government psy-op. Just enough whimsy to keep us from rioting. A dog got on a bus and went to a shopping center all on its own. Oh that's so sweet, maybe no looting tonight.

I don't open a Word document. The train Wi-Fi stutters and cuts. I close the laptop lid. Leave it in front of me on the table like a slab of stone.

I cannot write. I am a cliché. First novel a quiet success. The imagined lives of J. Alfred Prufrock's women. Lines of poetry pulled into the shape of a whole new world. Applause in the broadsheets. Pensive profile headshots in half-light. An appetite for what might come next. Questions about my politics. My inspiration. My mind. What I eat for breakfast. Did I prefer Game of Thrones or Succession?

And now.

Nothing. Stuck. Blocked.

Empty.

And so here we are.

Another cliché. Running away from life to write my novel. My editor found the retreat for me when yet another deadline slipped by and I'd stopped lying about delivering the manuscript in a few weeks. She emailed the link and there was a line about understanding my difficult circumstances but she'd bolded the new delivery date. Her thoughts were with me. I didn't want to go. JP was furious with me. It was an anger I hadn't seen in him. I loved it. I tried to absorb every molecule of his emotions. Finally. He wasn't taking care of me. He wasn't trying to make things better. He was raising his voice. Throwing his arms out. Clenching his fists. Telling me to do something. Anything. Make a change. Stop this. Just stop this. I replied to my editor and thanked her for the opportunity. I'd love to go.

When it happened my editor sent flowers. Lilies. Funeral flowers. On the nose really, for someone who is supposed to work with nuance. And toxic to cats. JP put them on a high shelf in the living room. The smell wound its way through the whole flat. Thick. Bound up with death. It choked me. The water rotted to brown. JP threw them in the bin. A smear of pollen tattooed on his t-shirt.

I don't walk past the flower stall on the way to the Tube anymore.

Even the air can catch you off-balance.

The retreat is for struggling writers. It's a financial thing, they said when I asked what that word meant. You know, like you need to buy yourself the time. And if you need the space. Literal and metaphorical. The woman on the phone was a poet.

They gave me the cottage and a lump sum in my bank account under condition that I thanked the organization in the acknowledgments of my novel. As if the novel was a certainty. That it would definitely exist. I'd fallen for that trick before. There was a horror and a hope in it. But I just said of course of course. The money from my first tiny advance had been swallowed up by London and life and I felt suddenly giddily rich. I relied on JP too much. Now I had something of my own. This money will last, I told myself. What can you buy in the middle of nowhere. What can you do in the middle of nowhere except write. Look at the marvelous beauty of nature and write a book. That's it. That's all I have to do. Write a book.

The landscape changes. Of course it does. Houses peel away and the world is stripped bare. The sky is huge. A few trees pressed against the horizon. A twist of a hare, or is it a rabbit? I never did know the difference. Never needed to. Don't need to know now but it niggles. A problem I can solve. An easy answer. I get my phone out. No signal. Six messages from JP. Sent not long after I left. Photos of the cat. A loveheart emoji. Telling me he misses me. That everything will be alright. Asking where the bin bags are.

Excerpted from Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen. Copyright © 2026 by Katya Balen. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.