Borrowed Light

A broken-down bookmobile, a single mum who keeps time for a county, and the mechanic who quietly learns her heart’s routes.

Niamh Murphy runs her life by routes and timetables.
By day she drives the county bookmobile, stamping dates and handing out stories from parish halls and school yards. By night she’s raising two kids who know that love looks like packed lunches, bedtime chapters, and never missing a library stop.
When her aging van stalls one rainy Tuesday on a back road, the man who pulls over isn’t just any good Samaritan. Eamon O’Shea is the local mechanic with a reputation for fixing anything that limps into his yard… and for keeping his own losses locked down tight.
What starts as a favour — a jump lead here, a spare part there — turns into a quiet partnership: late-night repairs, emergency routes, tea in chipped mugs while the engine cools. As petitions are signed, sponsors wooed, and a council meeting looms that could shut the service for good, Niamh and Eamon find themselves standing side by side, not just for the van, but for the community it holds together.
In a world that tells her to do less, be less, Niamh keeps choosing the long way round: the school gates, the farm roads, the estates that rely on the sound of the horn and the promise of books. And Eamon keeps showing up with socket sets and steady hands, learning every quirk of her routes — and every fault line she won’t admit she has.
Borrowed Light is a soft, slow-burn Irish romance about the people who keep small towns running: single parents, night-shift mechanics, school librarians, and kids who know exactly how much it costs an adult to show up on time.
Perfect for readers who love:

• Quiet, deeply kid-first romance with real-life logistics
• Found family and community that rally when things go wrong
• Domestic intimacy — kettles, rota swaps, school assemblies, and plans made at the kitchen table
• Grief handled gently, with room for laughter, hope, and a hard-won happy ending
• For fans of Emily Henry’s warmth, Josie Silver’s slow ache, and Irish small-town stories where the kettle is always on and the village WhatsApp never sleeps.