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"Over the course of a single week in a small English village, a widowed octogenarian who has spent her last years alone, ready to die, discovers an unexpected reason to live. After living abroad for sixty years, Helen Cartwright returns to the English town where she was born. She buys a nondescript suburban house on Westminster Crescent, a nondescript suburban street, and settles into a repetitive, reclusive existence: "Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle-as though even for death there is a queue." Three uneventful, lonely years later, Helen's life takes a sudden turn when an unexpected guest arrives: a small, good-natured mouse. With his trademark compassion and uncanny attention to detail, Simon Van Booy illuminates not only the sustaining friendship forged between widower and mouse, but the reverberations of goodness that ripple out from acts of kindness"--