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The Long Year
Paperback
FantasyGeneral GLBTQIA Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 24 2026
Pages: 338
Weight: 0.86
Height: 0.76 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
This is the new, revised edition of The Uncounted Days by Justin Neufeld, now titled The Long Year.
Panopolis, Upper Egypt, AD 391.
Kollouthos is a town councillor stuck with collecting this year's taxes. He is also the last sacred scribe of a temple nobody visits anymore. While the church burns the old books, he has kept his hidden in jars in his father's tomb.
Then the numbers in his tax ledger start changing overnight. A neighbor forgets her son's name. The dead in the necropolis won't stay still.
He knows what it is. The temples used to keep a thing called the Uncounted bound inside the extra days at the end of the year, and every copy of the binding that goes into the fire lets the knots slip. This is a long year, six extra days instead of five, and the door is at its weakest. His copy may be the last one complete. Holding it takes thirty trained voices and one more to say the close.
He says no. There aren't thirty priests of the old gods left, he's short on the tax money, and owning those books could end his career.
Then Phoibammon turns up, a broke village presbyter who sleeps with salt under his pillow and has dreamed of the thing too. He thinks the words matter more than the gods. Any trained voice can carry them, if they're written in Greek letters.
So one summer, a temple scribe and a Christian priest set out to find, persuade, ship, feed and house thirty strangers who mostly distrust each other. An archdeacon with a sincere grudge is watching. A fellow councillor is reading over Kollouthos's accounts. And somewhere on a crowded boat going upriver, the two of them fall in love.
The Long Year is queer historical fantasy for adult readers, set in late Roman Egypt: tax ledgers and lamp oil, bread and boat fares, old magic in a new alphabet, and two men on opposite sides of a changing world who find each other anyway. This revised edition adds a map and a cast list.
Content note: graphic violence, death and grief, strong language, slavery, and religious persecution.
Book One of The Uncounted Days.
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