Calendar

TWELVE MONTHS AND A DAY

Louisa’s new novel Twelve Months And A Day is out on June 9. You can pre-order now on your site of choice. I’m told that pre-ordering helps in the algorithms and can have an important effect on how a book does. Even if it gets to be a bestseller in ghost horror (it’s NOT a horror story) that gives it some magic flag which makes it more visible . . .

‘A beautiful book. Insanely romantic and utterly convincing’ Julie Myerson

‘A wonderful novel, charming and surprising, filled with loss and its triumphant opposites’ Susie Boyt

‘A wonderful and inventive novel, sorrowful and hopeful in equal measure. It was a true pleasure to read’ Miranda Cowley Heller

‘A skilfully calibrated love-after-death tale, it’s a four course feast of hearts broken, hearts mended, of songs, laughter, old regrets and fresh desire, that demands a major film deal’ Patrick Gale

. . .

A Widow’s Tale: by Louisa Young; from The Daily Telegraph

Do you worry your partner might be an alcoholic? Here’s a useful way of looking at it: it’s not what you drink, or how much; it’s why you drink, and what it does to you. What does it do to your partner? What does that do to you?

I knew mine was. We’d had a thing for each other since we were 17 and first met on the staircase of Oxford college where he had won a place from Wigan Grammar School to read music. A 25-year friendship-cum-romance ensued until we finally got together for good.

His drinking brought us together initially, by disinhibiting us, and also kept us apart. It was too much, it scared me. Yes Robert was charismatic, handsome, prodigiously talented, kind and witty, but he was also…

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/widows-tale-really-like-love-alcoholic/

You Left Early: the album

Louisa’s debut album with Birds of Britain was released— just called ‘You Left Early’. It too deals first-hand with love and death; drink and grief. You can find it in all the old familiar places: listen to some tracks on Soundcloud, pre-order the whole thing on Amazon, iTunes or Spotify, or in your local record store. The music comes in three historical forms: on beautiful vinyl, uncool CD and today’s norm, the unromantic but convenient download.

Edinburgh Book Festival

Louisa appeared the Edinburgh Book Festival with Sigrid Rausing, author of ‘Mayhem’, discussing addiction, and what we’re meant to to do — or not do — when this illness descends on those we love, and thus us too. ‘Perhaps even writing a book like this is part of it, part of the obsession, the family disease.’

I Am Heathcliff

‘Heathcliff I Have Known’, a short story, was published in ‘I Am Heathcliff’, a collection compiled by Kate Mosse, commissioned by The Borough Press for Emily Brontë’s bicentenary year. ‘I hate Heathcliff; I hate Heathcliff-type behaviour. I hate the way it’s been romanticised. But Ann Bronte, now. ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’. There’s a good book about nasty men and women who try to get away.’