The Girl from Nowhere

Two strangers meet at the edge of ending everything. Felix Vanston, just released from prison and holed in a squalid London lodging house, has made his final preparations. Rona Leigh has just leapt from her uncle's balcony, desperate to escape. They find each other in the dark, two young people whom society has discarded, and something ignites between them: not quite hope, but its raw precursor. Felix's instinct to protect awakens; Rona gives him a reason to stay. What follows is a tumultuous flight through the fog-shrouded streets of Edwardian London, where kindness is suspect and every kindness is dangerous. Mrs. Reynolds Baillie writes with unflinching tenderness about the algebra of desperation and the strange arithmetic of salvation. This is a novel that takes suicide seriously, neither romanticizing nor flinching, while arguing quietly but firmly that connection can be the thing that pulls you back from the edge. For readers who appreciate literary fiction that confronts human fragility without surrendering to it.