The Long Stay

She sees everything. She can't tell anyone. And she's the only one who knows it was murder. For forty years, Iris Heard wrote down other people's words. Then a stroke took her own. Now she can't walk, she can't speak, and she has been a patient on Curlew Ward so long that the staff wheel her to the window the way you'd move a plant into the light. To them, she is part of the furniture. The trouble with furniture is that it sees everything. When Bryony (the one nurse who ever treated Iris like a person) is found dead at the foot of the fire-escape stairs, the whole hospital agrees it was a terrible accident. Iris knows it wasn't. She knows because of the hum she heard in the dark, and the little blue car that never left the car park, and a hundred small things only the furniture would notice. But who listens to a woman who can't speak? Only Shannon: sixteen, furious, written off by everyone, and sent to the ward to do her hours. Together, the two most overlooked people in the building start asking the question no one else will: who is killing the patients nobody comes to visit, and why does the answer keep leading back to the kindest person on the ward? Very still. Very dark. Very funny about dying on the NHS. A completely standalone novel about who counts as a person, and a heroine you will never forget.