Explore Freely / Books and Fiction

03

Books and Fiction

Published work, a novel in editing, and the story worlds around them.

Interim book cover for Lira, a novel by Ashley Mason
Interim cover artwork

Songs from the story

Lira’s song

Choose the Morning

Henry’s song

What Time Allows

In editing Available late summer on Amazon

Lira

The hardest part of living forever is not losing everyone. It is choosing someone worth losing.

For more years than she likes to count, Lira Vale has survived by leaving before anyone notices she does not age.

Behind the counter of her ancient York bookshop, she has created a life built on careful routines, rotating identities, and locked rooms. She has loved before. She has borne children. She has watched every one of them grow old and die.

She will not make that mistake again.

Henry Calder remembers her.

As a lonely child in the 1980s, he spent his afternoons reading in the corner of Lira’s shop. When he returns to York forty years later, grieving his wife and settling his parents’ affairs, Lira looks exactly as she did when he was ten.

A collection of old books gives them a reason to work together. Their collaboration grows into a business, a friendship, and finally a love Lira has spent centuries refusing to want.

Henry knows she cannot grow old beside him.

Lira knows exactly how their story must end.

What neither understands is how completely a finite love can change an endless life.

Moving between present-day York and Los Angeles and the buried histories Lira has tried to forget, Lira is a restrained, deeply emotional story about mortality, memory, and what it means to be fully seen and chosen anyway.

Forever is not the promise. Choosing each other is.

RoseLynn character portrait among ruined city streets Moody black-and-white portrait of Rose in the rain