Linked stories about the incomer, and the long, uncertain work of calling a place home.

Blending fiction and creative non-fiction, Borrowed for a Short Time draws on Tyler Keevil's own move from Canada to rural Wales. Recurring characters move through isolation, love and the long negotiation of belonging: a workplace accident at a shuttered industrial site at Christmas; a couple trying to save an injured owl in a snowstorm; volunteers dragging a river for a missing child. The settings shift between mid-Wales and urban Vancouver, and the distance between them is never only geographical.

This is a book about the incomer, a figure met in every small community in Europe with the same mixture of welcome and wariness. Keevil writes that position honestly from the inside — the outsider's sharpened attention to what the native no longer notices, and the lingering doubt about whether attention is enough to earn a place. In a Welsh-speaking community, where the question also carries the weight of a language's survival, the stakes are unusually clear, and readers from the Gaeltacht to the Basque Country will recognise the argument.