Nell Crane has never held a boy's hand. In a city devastated by an epidemic, where survivors are all missing parts-an arm, a leg, an eye-Nell has always been an outsider. Her father is the famed scientist who created the biomechanical limbs that everyone now uses. But she's the only one with her machinery on the inside: her heart. Since the childhood operation, she has ticked. Like a clock, like a bomb. And as her community rebuilds, everyone is expected to contribute to the society's good... but how can Nell live up to her father's revolutionary ideas when she has none of her own? Then she finds a lost mannequin's hand while salvaging on the beach, and inspiration strikes. Can Nell build her own companion in a world that fears advanced technology? The deeper she sinks into this plan, the more she learns about her city-and her father, who is hiding secret experiments of his own.

Sarah Maria Griffin's first novel, Spare and Found Parts, was published by Titan Books in Spring 2018 and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards that year. Her second, Other Words For Smoke, arrived in April 2019. Her collection of essays about emigration, Not Lost, was published by New Island Press in 2013. Her nonfiction has appeared in Winter Papers, Guts, The Stinging Fly and The Irish Times and more recently, in a weekly series about the internet for The Gloss Magazine. She was the recipient of an Arts Council Bursary for Literature in 2017 and 2018, and is a winner of the European Science Fiction Chrysalis Award. She was the Writer in Residence in Maynooth University in 2017/18, the DLR Writer In Residence in 2018/19. She tweets @griffski.