The following is from Siân Hughes's No Such Thing as Monday. Hughes lives in rural Cheshire and is a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Her first collection of poetry, The Missing, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the First Collection Poetry Prize from the Seamus Heaney Centre, among other accolades. Her first novel, Pearl, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2024.