# Novel Interior > An elegant 5.5×8.5 literary fiction interior with a title page, copyright, epigraph, part title, and chapters set in a classic serif with drop caps, scene-break ornaments, and mirrored margins. Source: https://buildpdfs.com/templates/novel-interior Category: Digital Products An elegant 5.5×8.5 literary fiction interior with a title page, copyright, epigraph, part title, and chapters set in a classic serif with drop caps, scene-break ornaments, and mirrored margins. ## What's included - 5.5×8.5 trim with mirrored margins - Title page, copyright, and epigraph - Part-title pages and centered chapter openers - Classic serif body with drop caps and small-caps lead-ins - Centered scene-break ornaments and running heads ## Sample content Marianne Ashcombe ### The Salt Lantern A Novel of the Estuary Coast ❧ Wedgwood & Crane · London This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. First published in Great Britain in 2026 by Wedgwood & Crane, an imprint of the Estuary House Group, 14 Carrack Lane, London EC1 7QR. Copyright © 2026 by Marianne Ashcombe. The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-90742-558-3 · Typeset in EB Garamond by Carrack Lane Compositors · Printed and bound by Wrackmere Press. 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 > The sea keeps no grudges and forgets no names. It only returns them, one by one, when the tide has nothing left to carry. > > — from _The Wrackmere Almanac_, 1871 Part One The Tide Year Chapter One #### The House at Wrackmere The house had been waiting for her the way old houses wait, which is to say without patience and without hurry, simply by standing where it had always stood while everything around it learned to leave. Eleanor saw the chimneys first, two crooked fingers of brick above the marsh grass, and then the slate roof gone green at the seams, and then the whole grey face of it turning slowly toward the lane as the taxi rounded the last bend. The driver said nothing. He had said nothing for three miles, ever since the tarmac gave way to flint and the gulls began to follow them inland. She paid him at the gate because the gate was as far as he would go. Beyond it the drive dissolved into puddles the colour of weak tea, and the air came off the estuary thick with salt and the green rot of low water. Eleanor stood with her case in both hands and listened. There was the wind in the marram, and under the wind the long sighing draw of the sea retreating somewhere out past the spit, and under that, fainter still, the particular silence of a place that had decided she was already a stranger. Twenty-six years. She had counted them on the train, the way other people count sheep, and the number had refused to feel like hers. When she left she had been nine years old and certain of nothing except that the tide would always come back. Now she was thirty-five, certain of almost everything and glad of almost none of it, and the tide, she could see, had gone out a very long way indeed. ❖ Inside, the cold had a texture to it, soft and furred, as though the rooms had been breathing the same damp breath for a quarter of a century and had grown a coat against the world. Eleanor went from door to door with the key her aunt's solicitor had posted to her in a padded envelope, and the key fit every lock, which surprised her, because nothing else in her life fit anything anymore. In the kitchen a calendar still hung from a nail, turned to a March she had not lived through, its squares blank but for a single word in her aunt's slanting hand: _begins_. She did not put her case down. It seemed important, somehow, to keep one hand attached to the thing she had brought from elsewhere, as if the house might otherwise persuade her she had never been anywhere at all. The light through the seaward windows was the colour of old pearl, and it lay across the flagstones in long unhurried bars, and dust moved in it the way memory moves, never quite where you are looking. On the dresser, beneath a film of grime, stood the lantern. She knew it before she had wiped it clean. Brass gone the deep brown of a chestnut, its glass clouded white with the salt of a hundred winters, its wick long since burned to a black thread — the lamp her grandfather had carried down to the water every night of his working life, and her aunt after him, swearing it kept the channel honest. _A light that has been lit,_ the old woman used to say, _knows the way back even when the keeper does not._ Eleanor had thought it nonsense then. She was no longer sure she had the luxury of thinking so now. She set her case down at last. The house, having waited, seemed to settle around the small sound of it, the way water closes over a dropped stone — without welcome, without protest, only the old certainty of things returning to where the sea had always meant them to be. Chapter Two #### Low Water Morning came grey and came reluctantly, the way it does on the estuary in the late part of the year, dragging itself up out of the mudflats inch by inch until the whole world lay flat and silver and exposed. Eleanor woke in her aunt's bed under three blankets that smelled of cedar and woodsmoke, and for a moment, before memory caught her, she was a child again and the day was full of low tide and the long brown miles of it waiting to be walked. She dressed in the cold and went down. The lantern was where she had left it, and beside it now, though she had no recollection of moving it, lay a coil of waxed cord and a tin of matches gone soft at the edges. She told herself her aunt had left them so. She told herself a great many things in those first days, and the house, patient as ever, let her believe none of them for very long. ❖ The man at the harbour wall was mending nets he plainly had no intention of using, working the shuttle through the mesh with the slow attention of someone who has decided that hands, at least, should be kept from idleness. He did not look up when Eleanor approached, but he spoke, and his voice was the same colour as the morning. "You'll be the Ashcombe girl," he said. "Come back for the house." "Come back to sell it," she answered, and was surprised by how the word soured in her mouth, like the first cold of the air. The man nodded slowly, as though selling were a kind of weather he had seen before and expected to see again, something that blew in off the land and rarely stayed. "Your aunt walked the light every night for forty year," he said. "Right up till the week she didn't. Folk hereabouts set their clocks by it. You could near hear the whole village breathe out, come dark, when that little flame went up the channel." He drew the cord tight and bit it through with teeth worn flat. "Hasn't been lit since. Funny thing. The tides come wrong now. Nothing you'd measure. Just — wrong." Eleanor looked past him to where the estuary lay open to the sky, the channel a bright thread stitched through the dull brown cloth of the mud, leading out and out until it lost itself in the haze that was the sea. She thought of the calendar and its single word. She thought of the matches gone soft and the cord coiled ready, as though the house had set the table and was only waiting, with that terrible old patience, to see whether she would sit. "It's only a lamp," she said. The man smiled then, for the first time, and it was not unkind. "Aye," he said, and went back to his nets. "That's what your aunt told me too, the day she came home. Twenty-six year ago, that'd be. Near enough to the day." And the tide, far out and turning, began its long slow walk back toward the land. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the standard layout for a novel interior? Novels typically use a 5.5×8.5 trim, a classic old-style serif around 11pt, mirrored margins with a binding gutter, indented paragraphs without extra spacing, chapter openers that start on a new page with space above the title, and centered scene-break ornaments between sections. ### How do I format a fiction manuscript into a book? Start with the right trim and margins, set body text in a readable serif, add front matter (title, copyright, optional epigraph), open each chapter on a new page, and use a drop cap or small-caps opening line plus scene-break marks. This template gives you all of that ready to fill with your story. ### Is this novel interior template free? Yes — free to use. Paste or describe your novel to the AI and it will lay out the interior, chapters, and scene breaks. [Use this template](https://buildpdfs.com/signup?templateId=novel-interior) — free, no credit card required.