Review of the Day: Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen

Our Numbered Bones is a story about a writer living in London named Anna Mendelson. Anna is supposed to be working on her next novel, but is having a hard time concentrating on her work, partly because she is also caring for her aging mother with dementia. Her agent is aware that things are not going well.

“My editor found the retreat for me when yet another deadline slipped by and I’d stopped lying about delivering the manuscript in a few weeks. She emailed the link and there was a line about understanding my difficult circumstances but she’d bolded the new delivery date. Her thoughts were with me” (location 162).

While at the retreat Anna comes across a woman’s dead body. Let me just pause for a moment and say that there is quite a bit of grief and trauma in this book. 

Here is the narrator's description of her attempt to make progress on her manuscript at the retreat:

“I am not connecting with nature. I haven’t found joy in a leaf. I haven’t thought of the perfect way to describe a cloud. I haven’t stumbled across my novel. Of course I haven’t. I am stuck. Still” (location 476).

The publisher tells me that this book is literary fiction. At least in my opinion, one of the necessary but not sufficient characteristics for this genre of novel is well crafted sentences that impress. I am not sure about this part.

Katya Balen has previously published at least seven books for children; Our Numbered Bones is her first adult novel. I found a copy of her first book, The Space We’re In, and found a lot more humor and heart in just the first few pages of that book. I would like to read more of that book.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy of this book via Net Galley. All opinions are my own.

epub. 256 pgs. Scheduled for publication 17 February 2026. Finished 27 August 2025.

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