Ninety Days More: A sequel to The Lost and Found (The Lost & Returned Series)

Some things are lost. Some are kept. And some take a lifetime to return.

For thirty-one years, Musa Iqbal worked behind the counter of a railway lost-and-found office, carefully cataloguing the possessions strangers left behind. He understood labels, claim slips, waiting periods and shelves. He knew how long to keep something before accepting that its owner might never come back.

People were harder.

A year after travelling to Ann Arbor to see his estranged daughter for the first time in nearly three decades, Musa receives another letter from Amina.

Their reunion did not fix everything.

For a while, father and daughter had cautiously begun finding their way toward one another. Then the telephone calls became shorter. A difficult conversation ended badly. And Musa did what he has always done when something matters too much.

He waited.

This time, Amina refuses to let him.

She gives her father ninety days.

During those ninety days, something must come from him. A telephone call. A visit. A letter. It does not matter what, provided Musa chooses to do it himself rather than simply responding to her. At the end, they will look at what they actually did and decide whether their relationship deserves another ninety days.

For a man who spent a lifetime giving lost things ninety days before deciding their fate, the terms are painfully familiar.

But Musa soon discovers that finding his way back to his daughter will require more than following rules.

A damaged photograph takes him to Amina's conservation studio, where objects are not restored by pretending their scars never existed. An old door brings him face-to-face with a man he has avoided for twenty-nine years. His teenage grandson, Eli, refuses to behave like an item in somebody else's ledger. And people Musa once knew across a lost-property counter begin returning with stories of their own.

Meanwhile, in the back room of Amina's shop, beneath her coat, sits a green canvas bag.

She has kept it for a year.

She has not opened it.

And Musa knows exactly how long it remained unopened before it reached her.

As one ninety-day period becomes another, Musa must confront a truth his years behind the counter never taught him: keeping something safe is not the same as knowing how to love it, and waiting for someone to return is not the same as going after them.

Ninety Days More is a tender, quietly powerful novel about fathers and daughters, estrangement and reconciliation, memory and inheritance, and the ordinary objects that carry extraordinary pieces of our lives.

It is a story about the distance between keeping and returning, between intention and action, and whether relationships damaged by decades of silence can be repaired without pretending the damage was never there.

Above all, it is about one deceptively simple question:

When someone gives you another ninety days, what will you do with them?

From Dr. Syed Ali Akbar Rizvi, Ninety Days More continues the story begun in The Lost and Found, while exploring family, forgiveness, second chances, and what it truly means to come back.

For readers who love intimate, character-driven literary fiction about complicated families, late-life second chances and the quiet moments in which everything changes.