A Borrowed Face

From the dark, you can watch the light forever, and the light never once looks back.

Mira has spent her whole life learning that lesson. Born into the smell of greasepaint and sawdust, raised in the wicker hampers of a travelling melodrama troupe, she has made herself into something small and safe: a girl who mends costumes on her knees in the wings, who never asks questions, who never sings the forbidden cradle song of the old eastern tongue where anyone might hear.

Sevran Republic, 1923. Five years after the Great War, the frightened new country licenses its plays and registers its souls. Reyne's Lanthorn Players crawl east by train and wagon through the burnt provinces, performing patriotic melodrama for the Office of Decency and Loyalty—a beautiful lie, beautifully kept, and the perfect armour. Behind that armour, the troupe carries secret passengers past the loyalty checkpoints, dressed and disguised and delivered to safety. Mira does not ask where they go.

Then a stranger's coat is laid across her knees with instructions to make it forgettable, and Mira begins to unravel a truth her makeshift family has buried for years: a betrayal hidden behind a beautiful face, and a great lost actress whose gown still hangs in the wardrobe hamper. When the company is marched to the border city of Sarn to perform for the regime, and a gentle schoolmaster and his small daughter are marked as the next to vanish, Mira must do the one thing a lifetime of hiding trained out of her—she must step into the limelight, the light that tells no lies it is not told to tell, and be seen.

Haunting, theatrical, and luminous with feeling, A Borrowed Face is a novel about courage and complicity, about the families we make and the faces we borrow to survive. It asks what it costs to hide—and what it costs, at last, to stop.

Some truths can only be told from centre stage.