Hold On Until The Tree Turns

Elias Mercer is twenty-eight, gentle, quietly funny, and very good at saying he's almost fine. From a small apartment eleven stairs up, he keeps a light on, feeds a stray cat, and tells himself the same small promise on the hard nights: hold on until the tree outside his window turns.

His mother has a bus ticket in her wallet. His brother has a gift wrapped in the trunk of his car. The woman who left him is carrying a four-page letter she cannot quite mail. An old friend has four words half-typed on his phone. Each of them means to reach him. Each of them is waiting for the right day.

None of them knows the day is almost gone.

Told through the scattered journals of the people who loved Elias, Hold On Until the Tree Turns is a quietly devastating novel about depression, near-misses, and the ordinary things we put off saying until it's too late. It is a book about the smallest margins between silence and rescue, and how a single plain sentence, spoken in time, can change everything.

For readers of Matt Haig, Fredrik Backman, and Gayle Forman, this is a story that will break your heart and, gently, insist on putting it back together.

Some books are read. This one waits up for you.