PLACES, PLEASE
She has been ready every night for fourteen months. Nobody has ever called her name. Nell Cabrera is a standby. She is paid to sit in a windowless room...
About this ebook
PLACES, PLEASE by ALBERT JOHN is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £8.99. Language: English. Categories: Romance.
She has been ready every night for fourteen months. Nobody has ever called her name. Nell Cabrera is a standby.
She is paid to sit in a windowless room under a stage, in full costume and full make-up, listening to a musical she knows by heart come through a speaker — in case the leading lady cannot go on.
In four hundred and six performances, the leading lady has never once failed to go on. Nine years ago, Nell originated the role.
Three weeks before Broadway, they replaced her with a name, and she has spent every night since standing four feet from the life she was supposed to have. Now she is on the road again: thirty-one cities, nine months, one dress that has never been seen by an audience.
Theo Marchetti has the opposite problem. As the tour's swing he covers eleven parts and goes on constantly — as a bellhop, a soldier, a porter, a name in the program nobody reads.
He has been filling other people's empty chairs since he was nine years old and has never once been cast as himself. On the first night of the tour, in an empty theatre in upstate New York, they make a pact.
One number a city, after load-out, on a bare stage under the ghost light, with nobody watching. She sings the lead. He sings the lead. Thirty-one performances that will never be reviewed, recorded, paid for or witnessed by a single human being.
It is supposed to be a joke about their careers. By Iowa it is the only place either of them tells the truth. And somewhere between the snow and the desert, Nell finds out exactly why the call to go on has never come — and how long the man she trusts has known.
PLACES, PLEASE is a warm, funny, quietly devastating novel about the people a company depends on and never sees: about ambition that has nowhere to go, about a woman who has confused being available with being loved, and about what it costs to finally say out loud what you want.
It is for anyone who has ever been kept ready. If you love slow-burn workplace romance with real weight underneath it, a found family you will miss when the tour ends, and an ending that is earned rather than handed out — this one is going to keep you up.
Read it in two sittings, then tell somebody. And if it stays with you, please leave a review: for a book about people who go unseen, being talked about is the whole point.
Book details
Details: 200 pages, about 55,837 words, published by ALBERT JOHN, publication date 22 August 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 3.5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
PLACES, PLEASE is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
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