2019/32: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night -- Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma

"... we'd like to report a disappearance. He's a consulting magician. What does that mean? Oh, he escaped from fairyland when he was five and he does things for anyone who pays him. What relation is he? Hard to say but we're both fucking him. That's gonna go, oh, brilliantly." [loc. 135]

A queer poly romantic fantasy set in London, featuring climate change, a Christmas pop hit, a magical snowglobe, and the 'fake wedding' trope. This novella delighted me so much that I read it again immediately.

Layla is happily married to Katrina: they have children: she is attending a Nativity play when -- during the Three Kings macarena -- someone knocks on the window of the school hall. It's Nat, blue-haired and gender-queer, come to tell Layla that their mutual lover Meraud has disappeared.

Nat is Jewish, makes a living as a composer, and can do some magic: Layla is Hindi, works as a pathologist and grew up with Meraud, and is not a magic user. Nat and Layla do not get along. But they have to work together in order to locate and retrieve Meraud, who is a powerful magician, can't follow a story with beginning-middle-end, and whose 'in case of emergency' number turns out to be the Thames Water helpline.
Meraud is ... not given to commitment (a corpse is reported that might be his: but no, the dead man wears a wedding ring), which is why neither Layla nor Nat has realised that he's missing for nearly two weeks. And why both of them, as well as trying to bring him back from wherever he's gone, have to start thinking seriously about his role in their lives.

Layla and Nat both have rounded characters and rounded lives: I especially liked Nat's friends Ari and Kay, and Layla's marriage is vividly sketched in a few key scenes. By comparison, Meraud is something of a cipher. Never wholly knowable, thinks Layla. But his personality is present, in the actions and reactions of those who knew him, in Layla and Nat's very different memories of him, and in the marginalia of his books. (Against 'those born in the Elflands', he's written "I am not THAT kind of fairy".)

I would love to read more about the three of them and their relationships. And I am fascinated by the system of magic depicted here: found objects, rule of three, symbolism and resonance, and the 'place over the water', which can be reached with 'a small boat, a scrap of red, a surfeit of foolishness, a fool's luck' [loc. 156].

Two authors to add to my watch-list ...