The Longest Post Round

Dougie Ogilvie spent twenty-two years behind a trade counter in Aberdeen, and then, in the worst year for work in a generation, he spent an afternoon carrying a cardboard box to his car.
The only job going is the one nobody in the Turriff office wants: the rural round. Forty-one miles of back road, ninety-odd doors, three hundred gates, and a last delivery up a mile of farm track that adds twenty minutes to every single day.
He is not a natural. He is impatient, opinionated, and entirely convinced this is beneath him. But a post round is a strange sort of education. There is the farmer who complains every morning that the post has gone through the wrong letterbox, in a house with one letterbox. The old woman whose kettle is boiled before the van reaches the cattle grid, and who knows everything that happens within ten miles, usually before it happens. The man who orders something enormous every fortnight and will not say what he is building. Two sisters, one house, two front doors, and thirty years of silence. A boy at a road end, waiting for a letter from his father.
And then it starts snowing, and it does not stop.
Funny, warm, and quietly heartbreaking, *The Longest Post Round* is the first of The Aberdeenshire Postman: a year on a rural route, in the company of a man who is far better at this job than he will ever admit.

For readers who like their comedy dry, their weather real, and their small communities drawn with affection rather than sugar.