Ten O'Clock Snow

One wrong number. Two months of midnight texts. One winter in Bergen.

Emma Whitaker hasnt been on a date in seven years.

A literary translator in a Battersea studio, she works alone, eats alone, and lets her mothers calls go to voicemail. She tells herself she likes it that way. Everyone has stopped asking.

Then, on an October Wednesday, she sends a translation question to the wrong number — and a stranger named Martin answers from a small hotel on the Bergen wharf. He knows the Norwegian writer she is translating. He has been keeping the back-corner table set, for years, the way his father once did.

What begins as a single message becomes a ritual: ten p.m. London time, nine in Bergen. Two strangers, a screen of glass between them, and a winter coming on.

When Emma finally boards a plane to Norway in December, she discovers that Martins grieving mother has not opened a door in seven years — and that the woman she left behind, seven Octobers ago, has been waiting for her in ways she never imagined.

For readers of Fredrik Backman, Katherine Center, and Josie Silver.