Bibliography — 2016 to present
Four published books and one in progress. Each entry carries its synopsis, its editions, and the plain facts a bookseller or a librarian actually needs. Where a book is out of a given format, it says so.
5 titles
In progress · 2029 (expected)
novel in progress
A fifth book, begun in the winter of 2025. It concerns a lighthouse keeper's logbooks, a mistranslation that lasted sixty years, and one very long walk. No further detail yet — including, most days, for the author.
Forthcoming · November 2026
a novel
A cartographer's daughter inherits a coastline that appears on no map. Over a decade of surveys, arguments and quietly falsified notebooks, Isobel Rennick sets out to prove the place exists — or to convince herself it never did.
Moving between a shuttered survey office in 1974 and a flooded research station forty years later, The Quiet Meridian is a novel about the violence of accuracy: what it costs to insist on a fact, and what it costs to let one go.
“A rare, luminous novel about the places we make of ourselves.”
Isobel falsifies a notebook to protect a fact she believes is true. Is that a lie?
The estuary is described twice, forty years apart, in nearly identical language. What changes?
If the coastline does not exist, has anything been lost?
In print · 2022
a novel
Three generations of a family run a failing salt works on a stretch of estuary that is slowly reclaiming the buildings. When the youngest returns to sell the land, she finds her grandmother has been writing letters to a buyer who does not exist.
Shortlisted for the Fenwick Prize and translated into fourteen languages, Salt Rooms established the preoccupations that run through all of Vell's work: labour, silt, and the paperwork of grief.
“Vell writes erosion the way other novelists write love — patiently, and with total attention.”
Who is the grandmother writing to, and does the answer matter?
The salt works is failing from the first page. Why does the family keep the ledgers so carefully?
Is selling the land a betrayal or a mercy?
In print · 2019
a novel
A structural engineer who has never trusted a bridge she did not build spends a winter assessing a crossing her late father designed. The report she is asked to write is short. The one she writes is not.
Vell's debut, written across four years of night shifts, won the Aldermere First Book Award and remains in print in nine editions.
“A debut of uncommon structural nerve.”
The report she is asked to write is short; the one she writes is not. What is the extra length for?
Does she trust her father's design, or her own reading of it?
Where does professional judgement end and grief begin?
In print · 2016
essays
Fourteen essays on maps, measurement and the people who make them: a surveyor who walked the same valley for thirty years, the clerks who invented coastlines to fill blank plates, and Vell's own apprenticeship in her father's drawing office.
Originally published in a run of 900 copies; reissued in 2023 with two new pieces.
“The best book about looking closely I have read this decade.”
Which of the fourteen essays would you give to someone who dislikes essays?
Vell defends the clerks who invented coastlines. Are you persuaded?
What does the drawing office teach her about sentences?
Nine further languages are in preparation. Territory enquiries go to the agency, not to the author.
“The Blank Plate”
Ordnance Quarterly, 2025
“Nine Notes on Silt”
The Sunday Margin, 2024
“A Short History of Being Wrong”
Wintergreen Review, 2023
“Estuary, Undated”
The Fenwick Anthology, 2022
“My Father's Drawing Office”
Small Ordnance, 2019
Most of the essays above are collected, in revised form, in The Cartographer's Hand.