The Spare Days of Amelia Xavier

The world pauses, but not for everyone.

When eighteen-year-old Amelia Xavier wakes to a silence that doesn't belong to any morning she knows, she discovers she is one of a small number of people who receive a Spare Day, twenty-four hours while the world holds still around them, to use however they choose.

Ami doesn't use her days to break rules or settle scores. She visits a library. She climbs a hill at sunset. She rides her bicycle to San Jose and spends a day alone in a museum, looking at paintings until they mean something. She tends six elderly neighbors' neglected gardens in secret, leaving no trace and no name.

In the hours the world won't remember, she is working out who she is, and what she wants her life to become.

The Spare Days of Amelia Xavier is a quiet literary novel about paying attention: to a garden, to a pencil, to the way light moves through a museum window, to the particular courage it takes to tell the people you love what you actually want.