Notes from the Vestry

A sharply funny, painfully honest novel about ministry, marriage, privacy, and the strange politics of parish life. Thomas Martinson is the vicar of St Mark's, a church with dwindling attendance, difficult committees, eccentric parishioners and a vicarage that everyone seems to think belongs to them. Alongside his wife Natalie, Thomas is trying to build a life that is private, loving and ordinary - but ordinary is hard to come by when parishioners let themselves into the kitchen, gossip about the vicarage, question Natalie's role, and treat the couple's marriage as community property. Blending absurd comedy with emotional honesty, Notes from the Vestry follows Thomas and Natalie as they navigate intrusive neighbours, church bureaucracy, flower-arranging politics, awkward pastoral encounters, family grief, fertility struggles, and the exhausting expectation that clergy should always be available, gracious and endlessly resilient. At its heart, this is a story about boundaries: the right to say no, the right to have a home, and the right to remain human behind a public role. It is also a love story - between husband and wife, between family members, between people and the music, animals and memories that keep them grounded when life becomes overwhelming. Funny, tender, irreverent and deeply personal, Notes from the Vestry asks what a vocation costs, who pays the price, and whether faith, community and love can survive when everyone wants a piece of you.