Coming up in the next episode‪…‬

The first thing you need to know is that there was no keyring.

Every Year 8 at Shining Academy knows how Design and Technology works. You get a rotation, you get a scheme of work, and at the end of it you take home a small wooden object nobody wants. Violet Jones has been counting on this. Violet Jones has, broadly, been counting on being unimpressed by everything.

Instead she gets Ms Tan, a persona card with a stranger’s name on it, and a fictional town in 2050 where a woman called Deb Hargreaves works a shift she cannot afford to lose and has nowhere safe to keep the one thing she owns that matters. No steps. No worksheet. No correct first move. For Violet, an open brief with no edges isn’t boring; it’s the worst thing a lesson can be.

Then, somewhere around the third Wednesday, entirely without her permission, it starts to work.

Eight lessons. Eight episodes. A workshop that smells of MDF dust and machine oil, a technician with a drawer of felt in colours nobody else would have kept, a best friend building a shrine for a dead man called Aled, and a head of department who signed off a scheme of work in September and has just put his head round the door to find out what’s actually happening in it.

Violet notices everything: the tone under the tone, the sentence someone almost says and then swallows, the half-second two adults hold eye contact too long in front of an audience of children. It is, she is coming to accept, the central fact of her personality. What she doesn’t notice, until it’s more or less already happened, is that she has started to care about something.

Funny, precise and quietly furious about the right things, 'Coming Up In The Next Episode…' is a novel about a term of ordinary Wednesday mornings, and about what a subject is for when nobody’s counting it anymore.