Nell Ambrose

Nell Ambrose writes twentieth-century historical fiction about the moment a public decision arrives in a private kitchen. She is drawn to events that were fully documented and then comprehensively forgotten, and to the people who were told what they needed to know a little later than they needed to know it. She writes in short chapters, in the present tense, and she does not believe in villains. What Fell on Us, her first novel, began with a single line in a radiological-protection paper: that in the autumn of 1957 three thousand tons of Cumberland milk were diluted and poured into the Irish Sea.

The Rooms We Owe, her second, moves the question across an ocean and ten years back: two sisters, a boarding house and the weeks after the 1947 Texas City explosion, when every promise of shelter required somebody’s labor.