Nell Garrow fixes cinema projectors for a living, all over Europe, and she is very, very good at leaving. She has come home to the small Yorkshire harbour town of Skelby for nine weeks only: to bring the booth of the Lantern, her late grandfather’s 1913 picture house, back to life before it reopens. Then a big promotion abroad is waiting.

Hal Brennan has rebuilt every one of the Lantern’s 212 red seats by hand, oiled its two old film projectors for years, and never taken a job more than forty miles from his workshop. He is also the board member proposing to sell those projectors to pay for the roof.

He tells her so on her first day. Over one stormy, funny, crowded spring of buckets, board meetings, a seventeen-year-old volunteer with a twelve-page plan, a collector with very good manners and a ceiling that won’t stop leaking, two grown-ups with real jobs and honest reasons argue about what a small cinema should keep, and slowly find out what each of them has been afraid of.

A warm, witty, grown-up romance about old film, new beginnings, and learning the difference between leaving, staying and choosing.