Books / The Weather Indoors
The Weather Indoors
Now in paperback. A family sits out the worst winter in thirty years in a house at the edge of a cliff, and finds out what each of them has been keeping indoors.
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Read the first pagesReading group guideEvery edition and other shops
Every edition
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9990-4418-8
Out 12 March 2026, with a new afterword
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-9990-4412-6
Published 6 March 2025
Ebook
ISBN 978-1-9990-4419-5
All the usual ebook shops
Audiobook
ISBN 978-1-9990-4420-1
Read by Maeve Collier; 11 hrs 40 min
Also at your local bookshop, Hollin Street Books, Hatchway Books and Larkspur & Lowe; the ebook from Paperlane and the audiobook from Earshot Audio. Shop names are samples.
About the book
The Ashworths have lived at Gull House for four generations, and the sea has been coming for it for three. This winter, with the road closed by snow and the last field gone over the edge in November, all of them are home at once for the first time in ten years.
There is Maggie, who has run the house alone since her husband died and has not told anyone the council letter came in October. There is Ruth, the daughter who left, back with a suitcase and no explanation. There is Kit, who never left, and his boy, who has started talking to the radio. And there is the weather, which does not care about any of them.
Over eleven days of storms, The Weather Indoors opens the doors of a family one at a time. It is a novel about inheritance, about the things we say to keep from saying the true thing, and about the house we carry around after it is gone.
Reviews
“A tender, ferocious novel about family and erosion. I could not put it down and did not want it to end.”
“Garroway has the rarest gift: she makes quiet lives feel like epics.”
“The best novel I have read about a family in years. Every room in it is lived in.”
“Clear-eyed, funny and devastating. Book clubs will argue about Maggie for a decade.”
The first pages
The council letter came on a Tuesday in October, and Maggie put it in the bread bin, because nobody in the house had eaten bread since Christmas and nobody would look there.
It said what she knew it would say. It used the word unsafe twice and the word regret once, and it gave a date in March, and it was signed by a man called D. Fairlie whose name she did not recognise, which seemed to her the worst part. Forty years in the town and the man who ended Gull House was a stranger.
She stood at the kitchen window afterwards and watched the field. You could not see the edge from the house any more; that had been the case since the spring. You could only see the field stop, and the sky begin, and in between a line of fence posts with nothing to keep in.
Ruth would say sell it. Kit would say fight it. Her husband would have said put the kettle on, Mags, it hasn’t fallen in yet, and she found that she was already filling the kettle, as if he had.
The extract ends here. Buy the book
Reading group guide
Questions for discussion. The PDF has them all, with a note from me on how the book began.
- Maggie hides the council letter in the bread bin. What else in the novel is hidden in plain sight, and who is it hidden from?
- The book is told over eleven days of storms. How does the weather change the way the Ashworths speak to each other?
- Ruth comes home with a suitcase and no explanation. When did you guess why, and did it change how you read her?
- Kit’s son talks to the radio. What is the radio to him, and what is it to the rest of the family?
- Is Gull House a character in the novel? What would it say if it could speak?
- The last chapter takes place in March. Did the ending feel like a loss, a relief or both?