Nadia Osei-Briggs

I write quietly magical stories about the objects people keep, the communities that find each other eventually, and the histories that survive because someone thought they were worth saving.

The Wistwick Street Series — Book One

The music box has been sealed for eighteen months. It will only open for the right person.Wistwick Street has always gathered the right people. It just takes its time about it.Sable Okafor runs Mended Things — a repair shop for objects that matter. The ones people bring in when something is broken in ways they cannot explain, when they cannot bear to let go of something they cannot quite name. She has a gift she has never spoken aloud: touch something long enough and it will tell you everything. Its history. Its grief. What it has been waiting to say.For nineteen years she has kept this quietly to herself.Then Cora Reyes walks through the door with a music box sealed by a Filipino threadworker a hundred years ago — carrying inside it a vanished community's craft, a hundred years of keeping, and a melody no one living has heard.As Sable works to open the box, she begins to understand what her street has been quietly building toward all this time. Who her neighbours really are. What her gift is truly capable of. And what, at last, the street has been waiting for her to become.Warm, precise, and quietly extraordinary — Mended Things is a novel about grief, craft, inheritance, and the remarkable histories hidden inside ordinary things.The first book in The Wistwick Street Series.

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About Nadia

I grew up between Lagos and London — which means I grew up feeling like I belonged fully to both and completely to neither. Lagos was noise and colour and the particular quality of heat that gets into everything. London was grey and vast and full of people who had also come from somewhere else. Both cities formed me before I understood what forming was, and what they gave me, between them, was the habit of noticing thresholds. The moment when one thing becomes another. The place where something ends and something else, not yet named, begins.When I was eleven my grandmother died in Lagos and a box arrived — the things her family thought I should have. At the bottom, wrapped in a piece of cloth I did not recognise, was her thimble. Small and worn, with a particular dent on one side from decades of use. I did not know my grandmother well — the distance had made that difficult — but when I held it I felt something I could not explain. A quality of presence. The sense of hands that had held this before mine, and hands before those hands, going back further than I could follow. I have spent most of my adult life trying to account for that feeling. It is probably why I write.It is certainly why I spent my twenties working in textile conservation and community archives — the kind of collections that hold the records nobody thought to preserve formally. Letters in shoeboxes. Photographs with names written on the back in handwriting nobody can identify anymore. Objects donated by families who knew something mattered without being able to say why. I started a PhD in material culture first, thinking academia was the path toward the things I wanted to understand, and left after two years when I realised the framework kept putting glass between me and the objects. I wanted to hold them. The doctorate wanted me to theorise from a distance. I learned more from leaving than I would have learned from finishing, which is cold comfort when you are explaining it to your mother. The archives were better. The archives let me touch things.The most important lesson I learned there was taught to me by a woman who will recognise herself in this sentence and who I hope knows what it meant: paying attention to something is itself a form of keeping it alive. That sentence is the reason this book exists. It is the reason Sable Okafor exists. It is, in some ways, the reason I exist in the form I currently take.I moved to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire because something about it felt right in a way I could not entirely explain — and I have learned to trust that feeling, because it has never been wrong. It is a former mill town full of people who moved there for reasons they also cannot entirely explain, which makes it feel like the right kind of place. The moorland has a particular quality of light in winter that I have never seen anywhere else. The bread remains a source of genuine distress. I go to a boxing gym three mornings a week — not for the fighting but for the discipline of being completely present in your body, completely unable to be anywhere else in your mind — and I keep notebooks in bulk because I panic when I run out, full of overheard conversations and charity shop objects and street names too good to forget. I have kept them since I was nineteen and I have never gone back to read them. I keep them because throwing them away feels wrong.My grandmother's thimble sits on my desk when I write. It is not there for any practical reason. It is just there — the way certain things need to be present without being useful, which is something this book understands better than I can explain.The melody in the author's note is real. I heard it once, in a room I cannot find again, and I have been looking for it ever since. Writing this book was part of that looking.I am currently writing Book Two of The Wistwick Street Series. It is going to break your heart a little. I think you will be glad it did.

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