Love Never Does - Katie-jo Gracie

In a cottage on the edge of the Irish wilderness, Treasa Ó Sionnacháin crosses into the Otherworld to reclaim her stolen child - a boy the Gentry have replaced with a cold branch of rowan wood. Armed with nothing but stubbornness and a love that refuses to be reasoned with, she walks into the dark water, bargains with things older than language, and carries her son back through the frost of a world that was never meant to let her leave.

In a flat two bus stops from a Dublin hospital, Maeve maps her son, Theo, into existence, one grant application, one eye-gaze session, one sleepless night at a time. The doctors speak in the language of low-probability outcomes and sustainable care models. Maeve speaks in the language of a mother who has already crossed too many rivers to turn back now.

Two women. Two centuries. Two children who have been told, in the particular cruelty of their respective worlds, that they have nothing to say.

Love Never Does is a novel about the bargains we make in the dark - the ones no one witnesses, the ones that cost us the version of ourselves we thought we couldn't live without. It is about the crossing, and the work that waits on the other side. It is about the language of the hand, the language of the eye, and the language of a mother who refuses to stop listening before her child has finished. It is about the kind of love that does not require the beloved to be what the world expects them to be.

The kind that does not give up.

Love never does.