A deeply humane contemporary literary novel about displacement, welcome, loss, listening and the fragile moments in which home briefly appears.
In a Meeting House in West Yorkshire, a room is booked under the name of a harmless thing: Community listening, Tuesday evenings, six-thirty to eight.
Seven chairs are placed in a half-circle. One possible place is left unclaimed.
Imran has written rules for himself: do not rescue, do not summarise, do not turn listening into performance. Margaret brings biscuits and the memory of a house that once took her in. Mehreen arrives between care visits, with her son’s messages still lighting her phone. Daniel, Tom, Anne, Hamid, Lejla, Khaled and Karim bring their own histories of displacement, grief, hospitality, debt, belief, unbelief, shame and survival.
Nobody is required to explain how they arrived in the room. Nobody has to speak. Nobody has to tell the worst thing first. But at the end of each evening, one question remains:
Where, this week, was home, even for a second?
Moving through lives shaped by migration, refuge, care work, temporary shelter, spare rooms, public systems, private kindness and the cost of being misunderstood, Even for a Second asks what it means to make room for another person without taking ownership of their story.
Written with restraint, compassion and moral clarity, this is a powerful work of contemporary British literary fiction about displacement, welcome, community, trauma, dignity, and the small acts by which people hold one another without claiming to save them.
A quiet, searching novel about home lost, home briefly found, and the fragile rooms people make for one another.
