The Lost Christmas Post

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Fifty-two years late, every letter deserves to get there. Even the one that could ruin a man. Maeve Keohane is the last postmistress of Portnacree, a small village on the Kerry coast. Three generations of Keohanes have stood behind that counter, and on New Year's Eve the post office closes for good. Then Adam Larkin, a quiet English stonemason in Portnacree only to sell a cottage he never knew his late mother owned, takes down the damp wall behind her counter. Inside it is a mailbag. In the mailbag is the village's whole Christmas post from 1974: a hundred and sixty-seven cards, letters and parcels that everybody believed had been lost in a storm. Maeve decides to deliver every one of them, by hand, before she locks the door for the last time. So they go door to door together, in the rain, in Adam's van: a letter to Santa from a seven-year-old who is now a grandmother, a card from an old flame delivered in front of a wife of sixty years, a council letter about a septic tank. And slowly, two strangers stop being strangers. But one letter has gone missing. Somebody breaks into the post office to find out which. And the week before that Christmas in 1974, a girl of twenty was knocked down on the cliff road by a driver who never stopped. The Lost Christmas Post is a warm, funny, aching Irish Christmas romance: a slow burn between strangers, a real mystery fifty years cold, a village that sings carols on the harbour, and a Christmas Day swim in the Atlantic with a parish priest running a book on who will scream. For readers who want: • A slow burn that earns every kiss • A cold case hidden in the Christmas post • A whole village of characters: a postman who sings to every door, a sea-swimming captain six feet tall, and a priest with a notebook of odds • Kerry at Christmas: storms, carols, the Wren Boys and the Atlantic in December • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not everything gets there, but love does, and the truth. Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A death in the past; a parent's death before the story begins; a fire.