How to Keep a Letter Warm

Fifty-eight letters that were never posted, and the two love stories inside them.

Vera Lind is twenty-five and newly appointed to the lake town's school: one classroom, eleven pupils, a stove that smokes and a roof that leaks. Fifty-eight years ago her grandmother Anna stood at the same blackboard for a single year. Now Anna lives in a care home in the city, where an illness has taken most of her memory and all of her reading.

Vera writes to her anyway, one letter at a time, and keeps every letter in Anna's dented blue recipe tin. Through the letters we meet the old ferryman who still rings his bell at six each evening, the carpenter who fixes the school roof and his eight-year-old daughter, a postwoman who notices every stamp, and a town that remembers its teachers for a lifetime.

Each letter opens with a moment from history or a line from an old poem, a proverb or a classic book, carries one small thing to try and one short aside, and returns to its first line at the end. The book can be read straight through like a novel or one letter at a time, before sleep.

What these letters will leave with you

• A warm, quiet love story told in fifty-eight short letters
• A second love story from two generations ago, uncovered piece by piece
• Small things to try at home: kitchen steps, classroom games, ways to remember
• Short asides on ink, paper, ice, bread and bells that make ordinary things interesting
• The wish to write one letter of your own, and a warm place to keep it