Shaving the Magistrate

About this book

Twenty-two years after a sleeping fever emptied England and the Fens drowned again, Ely is an island of four hundred people under a cathedral. They call themselves the Stayers: proud and hard, the ones who did not run in the winter of 2039. Maud Garner, sixty-eight, is the island's barber and, once, its surgeon. Every Saturday she shaves Owen Sallis, the young man she half raised, now the island's first magistrate. In seven weeks the Moot will vote on whether the Leavers' starving survivors, camped across the water at Littleport, may come home. Owen wants the truth about 2039, and about the father who took the engine and drowned. Maud has the stories, the steady hand and the razor at his throat. What she tells him will decide who belongs on the island, and whether her stories survive his questions.