Mixed Sessions

About this book

On Thursday nights, the Victorian Turkish baths on Ashby Street in Calderbrook, West Yorkshire, are open to everyone at once: steam, marble, chlorine and half-dressed strangers. Now the council has voted to close them at midnight on the last Saturday of February. Six people refuse to go home: the manager who has kept the place alive for twenty years, the Welsh engineer who nurses its ancient boilers, the masseur with one unbreakable rule, the anaesthetist who comes to stop counting, the lifeguard who swims in forbidden water, and the tattooist who wants to save it all. Nadia Sayeed, sent by the council with a recorder to collect fond memories, expects nostalgia. As the building cools room by room through the night, she gets the year they spent falling in love in the heat — and the secrets each of them has kept from someone they want.