THE PLAIN HAND
In Annevar, nothing can be taught. A child may stand beside a stonemason for twenty years and learn nothing from watching. Skill does not travel through...
About this ebook
THE PLAIN HAND by Greta Innes is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £6.50. Language: English. Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy.
In Annevar, nothing can be taught. A child may stand beside a stonemason for twenty years and learn nothing from watching. Skill does not travel through words, or patience, or love.
It moves once, by touch, from one living body to another — and whatever is given is gone from the giver for ever, along with whatever else it decides to take with it.
So the country is made of three kinds of people: the given, who hold a craft and are called Hand; the spent, who gave theirs away and are kept in the Long Rooms of the city where they worked; and the plain, who never received anything at all, and who do the washing.
Ilsa Ardry is nineteen and she is plain.
She has spent ten years in a cold stone ward at four in the morning with a bowl of warm water and forty-one people nobody visits, and she is the only person in the country who has noticed that the hands of the emptied never stop moving — or thought to ask them what they are saying.
Then the clerk who decides which of the province's Givings happen sends for the girl who brings the tea, and dies with Ilsa's hands on hers. By a clause nobody has read in eighty years, the office falls to whoever was holding.
Ilsa inherits a cold room, a locked cupboard, a deputy who should have had the post, a queue of two hundred and six people who have waited nine years for a place, and a city of ninety thousand built below the waterline and held up by a handful of living hands.
She has eleven weeks until the river rises. And somewhere in the old stone of a lock chamber there is a fault that only one person in Annevar has ever touched — a woman who has not spoken a sentence in nine years, and whom nobody has ever asked.
THE PLAIN HAND is a novel about work, about who gets used up so that the rest of us stay dry, and about the difference between a mercy and a decision. It has no battles in it, no chosen one, no prophecy and no magic anybody can practise.
It has a flood on a date, an argument you will still be having a week later, and an ending that costs somebody something real and does not take it back.
For readers who want a fully built secondary world with no map to unfold; who love competence, quiet courage and people being decent to each other in cold buildings; and who have been looking for a fantasy novel that is kind without being soft. Complete in one volume.
If you finish it and find you have an opinion about what you would have done on that ledge, tell the next reader — a review is how a book like this one finds the people it was written for.
Book details
Details: 330 pages, about 92,391 words, published by Greta Innes, publication date 26 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 6 hours.
Format, language, and reading
THE PLAIN HAND 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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