The Toast Maker: Volume 3 (Christmas Special): Spend Christmas in Little Darlow

Snow has come to Little Darlow, and for the first time in years, no one in the village will spend Christmas alone. Iris has found something she stopped believing in: a home. In the warm kitchen of Elder Cottage, with the fairy lights left on through the snow and Moss the cat curled at the window, she and Tom are quietly, carefully building a life together. But Christmas in a small village has a way of asking more of you than you meant to give. There is a wooden star to hang-the one Tom's father carved the year before he died-and now a second star that Tom is determined to make himself. There is Margaret, fierce and grieving, who hasn't worn her good coat since the funeral. There is old Mr Pritchard, who arrives earliest on Christmas morning because an empty house is the hardest part of the day. And tucked in the back of a recipe card, there is a note from a woman named Mary-an apology she was too proud to speak while she lived, waiting to be read aloud at a full table. As the snow deepens and the carollers come, Iris bakes Mary's cheese scones, lays one more place than she planned for, and discovers that belonging isn't something you're given. It's something you make-a chair pulled up, a sentence finished in someone else's hand, a door left open to the cold. Warm, tender and quietly devastating, this is a story about second chances, found family, and the small kindnesses that turn a house into a home. Some doors are meant to be left open. Some tables are meant to be full. Also available as an audiobook.