Ask for the Moon
A novel by Thea Brandt, who spent eleven years as a crisis negotiator.
Case: Ask for the Moon · Bramber Press
Published 14 May 2026; 138 days since publication.
23.40.00LINE OPEN
The author
For eleven years, Thea Brandt’s job was talking to people who had every reason not to listen.
- 2008Joins the Metropolitan Police as a hostage and crisis negotiator. Sieges, barricades, people on bridges.
- 2013Private practice. Advises families and employers on kidnap-for-ransom cases in West Africa and Latin America. Never in the room. Always on the line.
- 2016Writes a short technical book on crisis communication.
- 2019Leaves.
It sold badly. Negotiators still pass it to each other.
Out of print · photocopies in circulation
“I was good at it for too long.”
Ask for the Moon is her first novel. She is Danish-British, fifty-two, and lives in Copenhagen. She does not do many events.
Everything Nadia does in a room, Thea has done. What Nadia cannot do at home, she declines to discuss.
A room where someone has decided not to talk is never silent. You hear the radiator, a car two streets away, your own breathing arranging itself to sound calm. The silence isn’t empty; it is addressed to you, and it is asking you to fill it with something you will regret. Most people last four seconds.
23.41.12[other party]:—[4 sec]
Everything you need to know about getting what you want is in this book.
None of it will help you.
23.41.16N:I’m here.
The novel
Nadia Sremac has talked people out of buildings, out of court, and off ledges. She has eight days to sell her house, close three cases, and explain to her husband why she never came home.
Each chapter is a different case. A kidnapping in Lagos. A divorce over a house neither of them wants. A hospital room where a family cannot agree to let their father go. Forty bakery workers who have stopped working. Different worlds, different stakes, same woman in the room.
Underneath all of it, her own marriage is ending, and she is handling it appallingly. She can read a kidnapper’s silence from four thousand miles away and cannot say one true sentence to her husband.
The title is the method. Open impossibly high, because the first number moves every number after it.
- Edition
- Hardback, 328 pages
- Published
- , Bramber Press
- Also
- Ebook · audiobook read by the author
- Case
- 240 × 159 mm · cloth spine
23.52.40[other party]:Two hundred.
Contents
Eight rooms. Different worlds, different stakes, the same woman in the room.
Chapter I, waxing crescent: Proof of Life
Never bid against yourself.
Then the number. Two hundred million naira. “By tomorrow. Or you know what happens.” She slid the next card across the table. It said: SAY NOTHING.
Chapter II, first quarter: Neither of Them Wants the House
Positions are not interests.
“I don’t want the house,” said Marcus. “I don’t want it either,” said Joanna. Their lawyers looked at each other across nine hundred pounds an hour of carpet. Nadia wrote: Nobody wants it. So what is it for?
Chapter III, waxing gibbous: Room Nine
Silence is a tool most people cannot survive four seconds of.
[4 sec]
The consultant said, gently, that there was no hurry, and then looked at the clock. Nobody spoke. The machine by the bed spoke for all of them, every four seconds, and Nadia let it.
Chapter IV, full moon: Proving
Almost every deadline is invented.
“Six o’clock,” said Graham, for the third time. “If they’re not back on the line by six, the dough’s done.” Nadia wrote 6.00 on her pad and drew a small box around it.
Chapter V, waning gibbous: Drag-Along
Your power is your willingness to leave.
“It’s a very good offer,” said the man from the fund. “It is,” said Ruth. “For you.” She had started the company in a spare room in Leeds. She stood up, and for the first time that afternoon everyone else looked at the door.
Chapter VI, last quarter: The Good Plates
Say what they are afraid of before they have to.
“Mum always said I could have the plates.” “Mum said a lot of things.” There were eleven of them, and nobody in the room had eaten off a plate like that in twenty years.
Chapter VII, waning crescent: Damp
The first number moves every number after it.
She said a number before he had taken his coat off. “Two thousand: the ceiling, the carpet and the month she’s had.” He had come to offer two hundred. He left having agreed to twelve hundred, and thanked her for her time.
Chapter VIII, new moon: The Kitchen Table
From people who work in these rooms
“I have sat in every one of these rooms. She gets the silence exactly right, which almost nobody does.”
“Chapter two should be required reading for every family barrister, and kept well away from their clients.”
“The bakery chapter is the most accurate account of a walkout I have read. The deadline is always invented. Always.”
“A novel that makes you better at arguing with the people you love, and then shows you why that won’t save you.”
23.52.41N:—[4 sec]
Read
A page from the middle of the book, because anyone can write a first one.
Chapter four. A bakery at two in the morning, and forty people in the yard.
“Six o’clock,” said Graham, for the third time. “If they’re not back on the line by six, the dough’s done, the ovens go cold, and the supermarket walks. Six. That’s not me being difficult. That’s physics.”
Nadia wrote 6.00 on her pad and drew a small box around it.
The canteen smelled of yeast and burnt coffee. Through the window in the swing door she could see the forty of them in the yard, under the loading-bay lights, not doing anything. Nobody was shouting. There was no banner. It was the most organised thing she had seen all year: forty people standing very still in the cold, in white hats, waiting for someone to notice.
“Who says six?” she said.
Graham looked at her as if she had asked who said Tuesday. “The dough says six.”
“The dough was mixed at two. Your night shift didn’t mix it. Nobody’s been on the line since midnight.” She turned the pad round so he could see the box. “So who says six?”
He opened his mouth and closed it. She watched him hear it for the first time himself: that six o’clock was a number he had said to 1, the union rep, at half past twelve, in temper, and had repeated to his area manager, who had repeated it to the supermarket, and now there were three grown men in three different buildings holding on to a deadline none of them had set, like three men holding the same rope with nobody tied to the other end.
“The contract,” he said, with less conviction. “First delivery’s at eight.”
“Then the deadline’s eight, and it belongs to the supermarket, and they’d rather have bread at nine than a new supplier by Christmas.” She crossed out the 6.00. “Let’s go and ask your forty people what they want. I bet it isn’t what you think.”
Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She knew without looking that it was the estate agent, confirming Saturday, ten o’clock, the viewing Tom had arranged and she had agreed to, in the one sentence she had managed to send him in two days. There was no reason the house had to be sold in eight days. She had not asked who said eight. She had not asked anyone anything.
1 Her name is on page 212.
p. 142 · the sample ends here
Over the next four pages Nadia walks into the yard, asks the forty what they actually want, and gets an answer none of the three men holding the rope expected.
23.52.45[other party]:Something serious. Today.
Eight rooms. Eight negotiations. One she cannot win.
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