Published by Little Toller Books, March 2027

A powerful and tender account of family, belonging and the unexpected places we call home.

Over a single night on a Lake District farm, Maria remembers a very different life: growing up in Scotland in a mixed-race family, leaving home as a teenager, years of rootlessness and restlessness, becoming an artist, and finally settling into life on a farm.

As memories mingle with the night, we become immersed in the intimate details of the lambing shed — the smell of bedding straw and hay, the signs of labour, the feel and movement of a lamb, the anxious waiting, the suddenness of birth, and the quick, practical decisions on which life and death can depend.

Gradually, the past moves closer to the present. In the lives of the animals — in birth and loss, attachment, dependence and care — we find echoes of Maria’s own story: her relationship with her parents, the long histories of displacement in her Pakistani and Canadian families, and how she met John and found a home with a farming family rooted in the same place for hundreds of years.

Told through the long hours, A Night in the Lambing Shed is the story of family, belonging and the unexpected places we call home.