Nathan Hesketh

Least Reliable Instrument

An instrument that lies, lies smoothly.

He can read a genome. He can't read the people in his own kitchen.

Jeremy Crale is a geneticist in York. For six years he has stayed at the bench long after the building empties. He has a reason, and he has never told anyone what it is.

He came in at six and he ate at the bench.

Pencil sketch of a DNA double helix with a bracket marking a gene, and the same short sequence written out again and again on either side
Fig. 1 The long stammering runs where a letter repeats and repeats, and the mender loses its count.

His wife Susan has learned the shape of an empty side of the bed. Their son Adam has one year left at home. Jeremy means to be there for all of it, and he will be, as soon as the work is done.

He told himself that gratitude was a kind of attention.

Pencil sketch of a teenage boy in a hooded jacket, hands in his pockets, looking into the window of an ice-cream shop on a wet, out-of-season seafront
Fig. 2 Filey, out of season. A boy declining an ice cream.

But a man who wants something to be true is the least reliable instrument in the room.

Least Reliable Instrument is a quiet, exact novel about marriage, fatherhood and attention: where we spend it, what it costs, and who pays. The science is real. So is the kitchen.

For readers of Ian McEwan's Saturday and Elizabeth Strout.

Least Reliable Instrument by Nathan Hesketh: a man in a white lab coat seen from behind, between a woman and a teenage boy whose faces are blank

Published 21 December 2026.