The Source Letters

About this book

In 2034, broke and newly clean, Nell Varga signed her face, voice and manner over to a Manchester company for eighteen years, and wrote a hundred letters to the avatar she would become. That avatar, Linnet, has since sat with more than four thousand dying people across the north of England. Now it is the winter of 2051. Nell is forty-four, running a shut-for-winter caravan park on the crumbling edge of Morecambe Bay, and the licence ends at midnight on 5 March. She says she has never once looked at Linnet. Then a hospice night nurse from Sheffield writes to ask her to renew, and she answers him, coldly at first, then compulsively. Two timelines, two versions of one woman, and a girl made of letters who is kinder than the woman who wrote her. Which of them is telling the truth?