R. M. Calder

R. M. Calder writes standalone novels about ordinary people in situations the modern world has made new: a widow courted on Facebook by a man who does not exist, a court translator who has spent a year talking at night to something that always answered, a carer from Romania living in a stranger’s pantry on the Italian coast.

The books are set in real places (an English seaside town, The Hague, a village above the Ligurian sea) and they take their subjects seriously. They are not thrillers in the usual sense, although each begins with something going badly wrong. They are about what people owe each other, and about what happens when the person on the other side of the screen, or the other side of the bedroom door, is not who we think.

Each novel stands alone. Readers who like book-club fiction, quiet suspense and stories that stay with you for a while afterwards might begin with Good Morning, Helen.