ESERIES NOW AUDIO SUMMARIES

Books you can “taste” before you buy 🎧

Press play. In about three minutes you’ll know if a book is for you, or for your kids. Free, no sign-up, works on your phone.

Adult SeriesKids Series

FOR GROWN-UPS WITH BIG PLANS

Adult Series: money, mindset & planners

See the full series →

FOR AGES 3–8 (AND THEIR TIRED GROWN-UPS)

Kids Series: story & colouring books by Mariam Noor

See the full series →

COMING SOON

On the printing press (well, the laptop)

• Knowledge Series, Volume 2: being written now. Volume 1 readers hear first.
• Nettle Street Mornings (Adult Series, short stories): read the free first chapter below.

Coming to Amazon: Nettle Street Mornings is also on its way to Kindle and paperback on Amazon. We’ll add the link here as soon as it’s live.

Dot Merriweather had never been late for anything, which was strange, because she had never been early either. She was simply, on every occasion, arriving, a state she believed to be the same thing.

This was why, on a grey Monday in late October, she decided to wake up at six.

Not because six o'clock was a good time. Dot had met six o'clock and it had not impressed her. She decided because a magazine in the dentist's waiting room had said that people who got up early had "calm mornings," and Dot had never had a calm morning. She had only had mornings in which the toast went first and the shoes came last.

"A calm morning," she said, to her kettle, "is simply a matter of systems."

Dot was very fond of systems. She had a system for the post and a system for the spare keys. She had once built a system for deciding which system to use, and it had worked so well that it had to be put in the shed.

So, naturally, she began with the alarm.

The first alarm was a normal one. It sat on her bedside table, politely, and said beep. Dot looked at it with the gentle contempt of an inventor looking at a bicycle.

"One alarm," she said, "is a hope. Two alarms is a plan."

The second alarm went on the chest of drawers, across the room, so she would have to get up to silence it. This was Dot's great innovation. She had read that distance was the secret to waking, and she was sure that somewhere, a scientist was proud of her.

The third alarm went in the hallway, on a small shelf Dot had specially cleared. The fourth alarm went in the bathroom, inside a drinking glass, which Dot said would "give it a good echo." The fifth went in the kitchen, beside the kettle, with a sticky note on it: GET UP, YOU LOVELY DISASTER.

By nine o'clock that evening there were seven alarms in the house, an eighth in the post-box, and a ninth with a ringtone of a rooster that Dot had to apologise to the neighbours about in advance.

She went to bed at ten, with a glow of professional satisfaction.

At five fifty-nine the next morning, she was sleeping the sleep of a woman who has finished her work.

At six o'clock, the first alarm beeped. Dot, still asleep, said "Mm," and silenced it without opening her eyes. She did not remember doing this. She had, it turned out, quite a talent for it.

…Find out what Dot does with alarm number nine in the full book.

Need a website or app too?

Send us a short brief, we design your landing page, add a logo and business cards if you like, and launch it for you.

Website design service  ·  All links