They keep ledgers because memory can be counted. The river keeps ledgers because it prefers the arithmetic of things that are wet.

When a photograph returns from the quay with a face washed away and a ledger’s marginalia begins to map towns like debts, Nola—keeper of a stubborn, oilskin-bound book—must follow the wake upriver. What starts as a practical mission to the island bindery becomes a ledger-shaped contagion: names are traded, hours are stolen, births and bread-bakes misalign, and entire towns bargain away the things that make them human.

Part Southern-Gothic fable, part psychological horror, Ledger’s Wake is an atmospheric slow-burn that asks: what happens when the tool that records your life decides what you’re worth?

• A river that writes in water-ink and never forgets.
• A bindery whose press taught a tide to count.
• A small crew—Nola, Rowen, Mira, and Alden—who stitch witnesses and witnesses’ witnesses into a counter-roll to buy back continuity.
• A ledger whose rules create markets for memory; a press that can compress lives to ledger-entries; and a price that turns private songs into public currency.

If you love psychological horror with moral complexity, uncanny worldbuilding, and slow-growing dread (think layered atmosphere, moral choices that sting, and endings that force you to listen to the whole audiobook again), Ledger’s Wake will haunt your margins long after the final tick.

Perfect for listeners of Southern-Gothic and literary supernatural horror who want dread that grows from civic detail and personal tragedy.