Each child has their own quirks and individuality, but there are also complications with physical and mental health. Beautifully describes the shame, vulnerability and then strength that comes from becoming a single parent.

Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (Audio Download Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (Audio Download

Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her. Inwardly tearing myself down even as I'm feeling solidarity and awe for another woman's strength and resilience. Tom Allen shares his Inheritance Tracks: Saving All My Love for You by Whitney Houston and Chicago by Sufjan Stevens. The chapters lead us through the year’s moons and their phases, which unites things cleverly - an unexpectedly grounding device. It is here they can be truly themselves; the book felt just as much a love letter to the natural landscape as it did to her daughters.Descriptions of the natural world permeate the novel, charting the ebbs and flows of the family’s life across a whole year. At night the moon offers constancy to this family in transition; by day the coastline helps them forget the challenges of daily life, drawing them into a world filled with magic, beauty and strength. Battles with illness, finances, bureaucracy and a broken heart all threaten to undo their tight-knit family unit, which seems as fragile as it is bold – but an insistence on making time for sensory, immersive experiences (from sea-swimming to singing) creates tides that pull them repeatedly back together. The trauma of navigating a separation as well as school systems unable to meet her children’s needs felt overwhelming and her honesty with regards to how this impacted her sense of self was something that was identifiable, ‘How can my story be excavated from the mine of my life when so much is devoted to others?

Caro Giles - TicketSource FORUM Books Presents Caro Giles - TicketSource

Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones – and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides. There has been a lack of role models (more than 90 per cent of established conductors are male), as well as outright sexism. Here is a woman who knows what it means to sit with her own experiences — those that rattle us and leave us changed — and not shy away from the invitation to transformation such things carry in their wake. Peter’s forthcoming album Recovery is based on his personal experiences after having life-saving brain-surgery. Set over the course of a year and charting her life as a single parent raising her four daughters, Twelve Moons is a stunning debut novel.Sometimes the use of candles and their mystical power is a bit too much, but this mother's fortitude is incredible.

Twelve Moons - Caro Giles Twelve Moons - Caro Giles

The authors are excited for the change their radical work might bring about, until Oscar Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency unnerves them. Addington has suffered so much from living in secret that he is prepared to out himself as a gay man. When I stand and stare up at the moon, I can imagine kindred spirits doing the same, and I feel less alone. The familiar certainty of its stages helped provide a certainty and reassurance in contrast to the unpredictability of life.

Caro’s world revolves around caring for her eldest, who is autistic and recovering from an illness which has temporarily robbed her of the use of her legs. Twelve Moons is a gorgeous book, an elegy to the power of looking up and of taking solace in nature. An incredibly beautiful book, simultaneously a love letter to Northumberland and a seasonal portray as life as a woman/parent/carer. Throughout the quiet turn of each month she charts the sea swimming, rock pool immersing, hill running to calm her busy brain, and of nature weaving it’s magic, grounding, nurturing and holding the whole family safe as she reclaims herself from the sadness and scars left by shattered hopes; rediscovering and unearthing the woman concealed by motherhood. Twelve Moons is one of those stories - a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone.