The Last Call North

About this book

Tess Hallam drives the night shift through Manchester rain with two maps in her head: the streets she can take with her eyes half-shut, and the walking routes she uses on days off so the work stays in the ambulance. She is very good at other people's emergencies. Her own, she leaves in boxes she has never unpacked. Then a man dies in the back of her vehicle eleven minutes from the hospital, holding an unfinished letter and a cheap return ticket to a small town on the coast. Tess does the one thing she has never done in fifteen years on the job. She keeps the letter. She buys the same ticket. At the end of the line is a woman named Maura, a knot of friends who have kept one another upright for decades, and a question Tess has no training for: what are you allowed to do with a life that touched yours for eleven minutes?