Eleanor
Ashgrove
The Umbrella Year
A Novel
A Novel · 2023
The Umbrella Year
Two strangers share one umbrella outside a shuttered train station — and keep meeting through the wettest spring on record, rain or not, until shelter becomes something neither expected.
About This Book
Theo lends half his umbrella to a stranger named Wren, and the rain does not stop for forty-one days. What begins as shared shelter becomes shared errands, shared detours, and a slow inventory of two lives paused at exactly the wrong moment.
Set almost entirely within walking distance of one flooded neighborhood, The Umbrella Year is Eleanor Ashgrove's most tender novel — a story about proximity, patience, and the radical act of staying dry together when everything else is washing away.
Inside
- I. The Station Steps
- II. Forty-One Days of Rain
- III. The Dry Route
- IV. What the Water Kept
- V. Clearing
An Excerpt
“‘You walk fast for someone sharing an umbrella,’ she said. ‘You walk slow for someone who wants to get home dry,’ he said. They compromised, as people do, by getting wetter together.”
— From Chapter I, “The Station Steps”
Details
- Genre
- Literary fiction / romance
- Published
- 2023 · Ashgrove Letters
- Pages
- 296
- Formats
- Hardcover, ebook, audiobook
What Readers Say
“The gentlest love story I have read in years. I rationed the last fifty pages.”
— Reader letter
“Ashgrove makes weather feel like a character and kindness feel like plot.”
— The Harbor Review