A DAY'S REACH

Everybody is born with two hearts. The second one chooses, once, for good — and after that you may never be more than a day's travel from whatever it chose....

About this ebook

A DAY'S REACH by Robert Martin is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.

Price: £10.90. Language: English. Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Everybody is born with two hearts. The second one chooses, once, for good — and after that you may never be more than a day's travel from whatever it chose.

Sander Volle was nineteen, crossing a flooded street with a bundle of hide on his shoulder, when his chose a woman on the other side. He has never spoken to her.

For fifteen years he has lived inside the circle she draws, taken the long way to market so as never to pass her door, and walked out every ninth day to the eighth milestone on the east road to stand at the edge of what he is allowed, and come home.

Livia Sarn was eighteen and getting out of the way of a cart. She has been the finest route-planner in the country ever since, and has never walked a road she designed, because a stranger she cannot name will die within six days of her leaving the city.

Now she has been offered the one job she was born for. It leaves in nineteen days. It has to be walked. So she hires a courier — not to carry a letter, but to carry a man.

Four hundred miles east along the Salt Road, a day's reach at a time, kept alive between one milestone and the next, all the way to a town where a settling is said to be something that can be taken off a heart.

Meret Odal is the fastest open on that road: one of the small number of people whose second heart never settled on anything at all, who can therefore go anywhere, and who can inherit nothing, marry nobody and hold no licence.

She takes the work because opens take the work they are offered, and she is proud of owing nothing to anyone in the particular way of a person guarding a wound.

What she does not know when she signs is that the taking-off is real; that it does not remove a settling but moves it; that it can only move onto somebody whose heart is empty — and that there is exactly one person on the road east whose heart is empty for a reason she has never told anybody and has spent eighteen years refusing to look at.

A DAY'S REACH is a warm, exact, slow-burning fantasy about the difference between a bond and a cage: about three people in a cart who cannot get away from each other; about a country that has built its entire law, marriage and inheritance on one fact of the body and has had that fact backwards for six hundred years; about a man who has organised thirty-four years around a limit and does not know what he wants without one; and about the oldest and stupidest question anybody ever has to answer, which is whether you are willing to hold on to something in front of witnesses.

One rigorous rule, obeyed without a single exception. No spells, no swords, no war, no chosen one, no prophecy, no map, no glossary, and not one line of "he said" in the whole book.

A complete novel with an ending that closes every door it opened, and a last page made of dust, cold air and a milestone with nothing on the other side of it. Not book one of anything.

If you have ever been the reason somebody else's life was smaller; if you have ever called an old injury a philosophy; if you want an argument you will still be having with somebody a week later — then read it, and then tell one person.

A book like this lives or dies on a single honest review, which is the only thing in this world that works the way a courier does: it goes a very long way, on its own, for somebody who will never know.

Book details

Details: 249 pages, about 69,618 words, published by Robert Martin, publication date 4 September 2026.

Estimated reading time: about 4.5 hours.

Format, language, and reading

A DAY'S REACH 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.

Buyers can use Ebokio reading tools where supported, including adjustable themes and fonts, AI read aloud and text to speech, summaries, and Ask This Book for eligible owned titles.

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