You will feel what it means to be the person who must grow the emotion a community has outlawed.
The Otherwise Novels · Cover revealed
The Gardener of Vanishing Seasons
She grows seasons the world has never felt before. One of them is trying to grow her back.
For seventeen years, Marra Kell has grown only safe seasons. Now an island that outlawed grief needs the one season it cannot survive without.
The story
What waits inside
Across the migrating islands, gardeners cultivate more than weather. They grow seasons of courage, vigilance, desire, and mourning, each one rooted in labor, consent, and a name willingly given.
Marra Kell once planted an ambitious season that erased a necessary fear. Her brother paid the price. Since then, she has accepted only harmless commissions.
Anchorhold offers no such refuge. Three generations ago, the island outlawed grief. Its people prospered beneath a mild emotional climate, but now the anchor chains are starving and the island has begun to drift.
To save it, Marra must cultivate the forbidden season from soil that no longer remembers how to mourn. The work will demand participation from the whole community, including those who built their lives around never feeling loss, and a payment from Marra she cannot choose in advance.
A tactile speculative novel about communal memory, necessary sorrow, and what must be tended before it disappears.
Seasons are not weather but cultivated emotional-temporal climates — a "Winter of Forgotten Names" is a real, tended thing — and introducing a NEW season changes the people who live through it.
Some emotions must be grown even when the community does not want them. The cost of refusing is higher than the cost of growing them — but the grower pays either way.
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.