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THE HABIT OF STONE

THE HABIT OF STONE by Clare Fenwick – ebook cover

On the island of Nurawai, the ground has begun to take things. It starts small and almost funny. A bowl left out overnight, found in the morning with the...

About this ebook

THE HABIT OF STONE by Clare Fenwick is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.

Price: £7.90. Language: English. Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy.

On the island of Nurawai, the ground has begun to take things. It starts small and almost funny. A bowl left out overnight, found in the morning with the step grown up over its rim. A net gone.

A pen of seven birds emptied without a sound, and the floor beneath them smooth and faintly warm.

Then a spring that has run since before anybody's grandmother closes in a single night — and then a man falls asleep on the safest rock on the island and is simply not there when the sun comes up. Every islander knows that islands learn.

What is done on an island's back, over and over, in the same place at the same hour by the same hands, becomes in time what the island does by itself. It is not magic and nobody thinks of it as magic.

It is the reason there is water where you dig and soil on slopes that should have shed it long ago. It is also, now, the reason something enormous and patient has begun to put an entire village's belongings away in the dark.

Arka Venissos is the island's water-man — the one person whose trade takes him down inside it.

He came to Nurawai from the other side of the world at twenty-two, married into a family, raised a daughter and a son, and in all the years since has never once called himself an islander.

There is a boat under a shed on the north beach that he has kept sound and provisioned the whole time. Everybody knows about it. Nobody has ever asked. When Arka finds where the taken things have gone, he finds something worse than a thief.

He finds that whoever taught this island to rob its own people did it out of the largest act of love anyone here has ever performed — and that his own hands are in the evidence. The rains are about to close the sea for three months.

His neighbours have begun, quietly and kindly and with the best intentions in the world, to look for somebody to blame.

And Arka has one season to make four thousand frightened people believe a thing nobody wants to hear: that you cannot make an island forget, and there is only one thing anybody has ever done with a habit, which is to give it somewhere better to go.

THE HABIT OF STONE is a standalone island fantasy with a single, rigorous rule at its heart and no sequel to buy.

It is a mystery with a solution you can work out, a portrait of a marriage with a locked door in it, and a slow, warm, quietly terrifying argument about what the world is learning from us while we are busy thinking about something else.

For readers of Circe, Piranesi, The Bear and the Nightingale and Uprooted — and for anyone who has ever wondered what their own doorstep has been watching them do. Read it in a week.

Then tell somebody what it did to you, and leave a review: this is a book that reaches its readers one recommendation at a time, and yours is the one that finds the next person.

Book details

Details: 262 pages, about 73,262 words, published by Clare Fenwick, publication date 18 September 2026.

Estimated reading time: about 5 hours.

Format, language, and reading

THE HABIT OF STONE 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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