The Cellarer of Sallowfield

About this book

On the colony world of Lammas, one standard year in every four is the Far, a cold so deep that the whole town of Sallowfield goes down into cold sleep while forty-odd people stay awake to keep them alive. Hester Quayle, a twenty-nine-year-old cellarer who reads sleepers' pulses on brass dials, means this to be her last Far: her wages will buy her younger sister's freedom from the Roster. Then the draw puts Ambrose Lisle on the Watch, a proud son of a ruined Shared house who has never seen snow. He is engaged to an heiress who sleeps under Hester's own care, and he is openly contemptuous of the 'turners' he must now work beside. Hester gives him the worst rounds and waits for him to break. But the Far is long, the cold is only beginning, and the past Hester has buried is waiting in the Hold.