Francesca Hornak

Francesca Hornak is a British journalist and novelist whose fiction finds comedy and tenderness inside family discomfort. Seven Days of Us gathers the Birch family at their Norfolk home for Christmas after eldest daughter Olivia returns from treating an epidemic abroad. Her required week of quarantine confines Olivia with parents Emma and Andrew and younger sister Phoebe, each carrying information that unsettles familiar roles. Hornak shifts among their viewpoints, letting sympathies change as private worries become shared problems. Berkley's American edition appeared on October 17, 2017; Piatkus followed in Britain two days later. It was Hornak's debut novel and became an Indie Next and LibraryReads selection. Jilly Bond narrates the audiobook. Before fiction, Hornak wrote for newspapers and magazines and published humorous nonfiction. That observational background appears in the novel's precise social friction, but she avoids reducing the Birches to comic types. Their enforced proximity becomes a study of how secrecy can protect, isolate, and reconnect people who know one another too well.