The Stevedore's Ghost Cargo Manifest

About this book:

At three a.m. on the Thames, a stevedore named Silas Thorne lifts a crate of Baltic pine and hears it whisper its true contents: a tortoiseshell comb, a brass surveyor's chain, a locket holding red hair and a scrap of paper dated 1812. The hold of the *Lady Alethea* is full of such crates—sixty boxes murmuring the names of things no manifest recorded, the small, lost gear of drowned men and forgotten voyages. Silas begins chalking the truth onto the lids, defying the tide-waiters and the official ledgers. Thirty years later, a lame customs clerk named Gideon Vance sits in a gaslit office writing with ink made of Thames brine. The salt-script blooms white on the page, reciting the same impossible inventory—and a wet, raw-hide footprint appears on his floor, though no one stands in the doorway.

*The Stevedore's Ghost Cargo Manifest* is a ghost story built from rope-burn and river mud, where the dead insist on being tallied and the living pay the price for listening. Moving between the frost-rimed decks of 1853 and the sulfur-yellow fog of 1883, it follows two men haunted by the same cargo: the leftovers that fell between floor-timbers, the buttons off shirts of men who drowned before steam-tugs came. With prose that smells of tallow, hemp, and thirty-year-old silt, this is a novel about what the sea refuses to forget—and the ledgers kept by those who cannot stop writing them down.