Cover of The Last Good Spring by Nora Kemble: two profiles in silhouette, one holding a view of Barcelona at sunrise.

The Last Good Spring

A Novel of Grief, Love and Second Chances

He lost her ten years ago. This morning she is asleep beside him.

Coming soon

About the book

David Serra is thirty-eight, an architect in Barcelona, a widower who keeps a tidy kitchen and a steady voice for his son. Lucas is ten, collects river stones, and hums a tune nobody taught him. Clara is rarely spoken of. She is in everything anyway.

Then David falls asleep on the night of Lucas’s tenth birthday and wakes in March 2014, twenty-six again, in the bedroom on Carrer de Verdi. Clara is alive. They have been married eight months.

There is no machine and no explanation, and he cannot go back. David knows what the next two years hold, and he knows that the life he lost and the life he loves cannot both be kept.

A tender novel about grief, marriage and what love asks of us when the choice is ours alone.

What readers will find

  • A marriage at its beginningEight months in, a rented flat in Gràcia, a spiderweb crack in the bedroom ceiling and a future only one of them knows.
  • A father and his sonA ten-year-old who names his stones and hums a tune nobody taught him, and a man who is careful with every question.
  • Barcelona in AprilMarble stairwells, the lake at Ciutadella, plane trees in new leaf and the long light of a spring that can be lived only once.
  • A time-slip with no machineNo gadgets, no paradox lectures: a marriage, a city and the longest two years of one man’s life.

Themes: grief, the loss of a spouse, raising a child alone.

The NK monogram of Nora Kemble

About the author

Nora Kemble is a pen name. Nora writes novels about grief, marriage and the second chances people wish for and rarely get. The Last Good Spring, set in Barcelona, is a first novel.

More about Nora.

Write to Nora

Questions, a kind word, or a request to hear when the book is out. Every message is read.