About
Fiction with soul.
Murmmers Press makes stories to lose yourself in, for the good days and the hard ones. Not cures, not advice, not ten steps to a better you. Company for the carrying, made of story.
Everyone hurts.
Everyone seeks.
Everyone loves.
Not sometimes. Always, somewhere,
and tonight it may fall to you:
the grief that learned your name and stayed,
the tiredness no sleep will lift,
the ache you have carried so quietly, so long,
you have stopped calling it anything at all.
And beneath the ache, the oldest hunger:
for the door that opens, the word that fits the wound,
some reason to have been set down here at all.
You have searched a hundred faces and half the books ever written,
and some nights the searching is the last prayer you have.
And under even that, quieter still,
the wish to be known, and to belong to someone,
to be held without first earning it,
to matter, whole, to a life that is not your own.
Hurt, and seeking, and love.
This is the whole weather of being a person.
You were never the only one.
You were only the one who believed so.
Attention is a kind of care.
We believe a book held with real attention holds you in return. That a made thing, given enough of it, becomes a kind of company. This is the whole of what we are trying to do: pay a book enough attention that it can go and sit with a stranger in the dark, and be enough.
What we mean by healing
A mirror
Some books reflect you back to yourself so clearly that you feel, for the first time in a while, known. No one taught you the words for it, and there they are on the page. That is medicine.
A witness
Others simply sit with you in the ache and ask for nothing. No fixing, no advice, no bright side turned to the light. Just company that does not flinch. That is medicine too.
Sometimes a book is both at once. Those are the ones we are here for.
The work
Every book is edited to protect what makes it itself, never to smooth it into sameness. The author decides how deep the edit goes, and nothing on the page changes without their yes. Where a book is best read in one sitting, we treat that as a gift to the reader, not a shortfall. The measure is always the same: does it still sound like the person who wrote it?
The author
Eric McLean writes from the seam between two homes: the sun-bleached stone of Cyprus and the grey, thinking rain of Edinburgh. Schooled by physics to distrust the surface of things, he makes fiction that listens for the murmur beneath: the hum of consciousness, the slow labour of healing, the strange arithmetic of being alive. He is a long-distance runner, and his prose keeps a runner's rhythm, patient, breath-measured, built to go the distance. Equally at ease among machines and mysteries, he writes toward the things that are true long before they can be proven.
The founding list is his. More voices will follow as the catalogue grows, on the same promise: the author's voice, kept exactly theirs.
Write to us
Readers, booksellers, and anyone with a question about rights or permissions: this reaches the press directly. Or write to hello@murmmers.com.
How did this book land?
If it met you somewhere, or missed you, we would like to know. This goes to the press, and nowhere else.
The spirit of the house
We are a small house with an unusual staff and a single, old-fashioned belief: that the right words, kept honest and put in the right hands, help. That is the whole of it.
Curious how the books are actually made? That is a story of its own. How we work.