I was sold as soon as I saw the subtitle ‘…a memoir on grief, swimming and sisterhood’ of Freya Bromley’s The Tidal Year.
Much like Jessica Lee’s Turning, Bromley tracks her emotional state against a year of swimming. Where Lee focused on lakes around Berlin, Bromley decided to swim in Britain’s tidal pools – it was her way of managing the incomprehensible grief she felt after the death of her teenage brother, Tom. Continue reading
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
If I had been asked to contribute a chapter to Zosia Mamet’s collection of essays about feelings and food, My First Popsicle, I would have written about my occasional sick-days as a child.
My Mum and Nan had a florist shop and if I was sick, I had to go to work with Mum. I would lie at the back of the shop on a plastic banana lounge, watching a tiny black and white TV. If I rallied by lunchtime (and let’s be honest, I mostly did), I would eat potato cakes from the fish and chip shop next door, and spend the afternoon misting the carnations (it was the seventies!) with my Nan’s special water bottle. Truly the best days, and the combined smell of flowers and the fish and chip shop oil is firmly and forever in my memory. Continue reading
Rom-coms/ meet-cutes aren’t my usual thing but I made an exception for Mikki Brammer’s The Collected Regrets of Clover because the main character, Clover, is a death doula – and grief-lit is my thing.
It’s a simple story – Clover, an introverted and socially-anxious woman, lives a life structured around her work, her pets, and visiting death cafes in New York City. Flashbacks provide context for her chosen profession – Clover’s parents died when she was a child, and she moved to the city to live with her grandfather. Continue reading
Proving that I don’t actually care about my never-really-shrinking-TBR-list is this list of new releases that are on my radar for 2021. Continue reading
Put your ‘expert’ hat on, it’s Week 3 of Nonfiction November.
This week, JulzReads asks us to Be The Expert/ Ask the Expert/ Become the Expert – essentially, share a bunch of books on a particular topic. My topic is ’empathy’. Continue reading
01. The highlight of our trip to Hawaii (in 2015) was snorkelling at the Kapoho lava tide pools. Can’t believe it’s all gone. Continue reading