The Lesser Hands

Thomas Hale reads the histories of valuable objects for a living. From a quiet flat in Marylebone he traces the chain of hands a painting has passed through, the stretches where the record goes dark, the question of whether the dark stretches mean anything at all. He has built a life as exact as the work and keeps it the way he keeps the chain on his door, every night, without fail.

Then one morning the chain is already off, and he knows he set it. The route he has run for years measures longer than the route he ran. A notebook he has no memory of keeping is filling, night after night, in a hand that is his and is not his, in a voice with none of his caution and all of his intelligence, wanting the things he has spent a lifetime deciding not to want.

Someone is living the parts of his life he will not, and doing it in his name. The woman he has lately, carefully, begun to let close has met both of them and cannot say which she is being asked to love. An old lie in a file he is meant to certify starts to rhyme with his own. And the record, when it is finally read, will have to say who did what.

The Lesser Hand is a novel about the braver self we file away in order to become someone who can be relied upon, and about the quiet, unrepayable cost of having filed it.