Joanna D Wieloch

When Ida buys a remote lighthouse cottage on a Scottish island, she imagines a refuge for herself and her six-year-old daughter, Lenka. After years of slipping away from Amsterdam, Shanghai, London whenever life grew too tangled, she longs for stillness.

The cottage has been empty for years and requires an extensive renovation. One of the bedrooms has a hole in the roof and an unexpected resident, an owl. The islanders welcome her with warmth and curiosity, and slowly Ida begins to believe she might have found her place. But peace has a way of unearthing what we’d rather forget. In Shanghai, she once trained painters to forge Van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet; in London, she was drawn into an art smuggling affair that still shadows her and her daughter.

When Ida and Lenka befriend ninety-four-year-old Matilda, the past and future start to blur. And when Matilda and Lenka vanish one morning, setting off across the country in search of Lenka’s father, Ida’s world tilts from still life to road movie. Joined by Hector, a kind-hearted delivery man with secrets of his own, she’s forced to follow through mishaps, strange coincidences, and moments of uneasy grace that suggest the universe might, after all, know what it’s doing.

A Gap in the Sky is a story about art, forgiveness, love and loss, and the delicate ways we learn to stay open to life’s unpredictability. It’s about finding home not in certainty, but in connection-and how even grief can shimmer with light.