Someone Has to Be Awake

Poppy Reece knows how to look after things. She just never thought fish paste would qualify her for a job.

After the supermarket replaces its night crew, Poppy becomes a security guard at the Erratum Wing, where forty thousand boxes hold lives the official record got wrong. Her new colleague Glyn has one working eye, a kettle-first rule, and a question she cannot leave alone: who kept the record of her brother's missing years?

Robbie has been gone for ten years. A mark in a shelter book and a library loan may offer a way back. But finding someone is not the same as knowing how to welcome them.

Warm, funny, and grounded in the work of ordinary people, Someone Has to Be Awake follows a family learning to hold on without holding too tight, and a night watch learning how to hand over. Its horizon reaches, quietly, toward the stars.