Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 6 November 2008.

In Sheila Hancock’s second memoir she looks at her life moving on, after the death of her husband John Thaw. Both funny and sad this is a book about an experience so many will go through and associate with, learning to cope on your own. Whether you have similar experience or not this is a thoroughly enjoyable book looking back, looking forward and refusing to give up and become invisible. An honest and moving memoir.

Synopsis

'Well now, prove it, Sheila. As John would say, "Put your money where your mouth is." Be a depressed widow boring the arse off everyone, or get on with life. Your choice. In The Two of Us Sheila Hancock relived her life with John Thaw - years packed with love and family, work and houses, delight and despair.

And then she looked ahead. What next? Gardening, grannying and grumbling, while they all had their pleasures, weren't going to fill the aching void that John had left. 'Live adventurously', a piece of Quaker advice, was hovering in her mind.

So, putting her and John's much-loved house in France on the market - too many memories - she embarked, instead, on a series of journeys. She tried holidaying alone, contending with invisibility and budget flights. She tried travelling in a group, but the questions she wanted to ask were never the ones the guide wanted to answer.

She tried relaxing - harder than you might think. Finally, heading out of her comfort zone, she found her travels and new discoveries led her back to her past: to consider her generation - the last to experience the Second World War - and the kind of person it made her.Just Me is a book about moving on, but it is also about looking back, and looking anew. Sheila, whether facing down burglars and easyJet staff (cross her at your peril) or making friends with waiters and taxi drivers, whether unearthing secrets in Budapest, getting arrested in Thailand, exulting in the art of Venice or mingling with the Mafia in Milan, is never less than stimulating company.

Honest - because if you can't say what you think at seventy-five, when can you? - insightful and wonderfully down-to-earth, she is a woman seizing the future with wit, gusto and curiosity - on her own.

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About the Author

Sheila Hancock was born in 1933 and attended RADA before embarking on a successful career in acting, both on stage and screen. She was awarded the OBE in 1974. Her previous book, The Two of Us, was a memoir of her late husband John Thaw and was a bestseller. The eagerly anticipated follow-up Just Me, published by Bloomsbury in August 2008, is a moving, honest and charming account of life after John. Sheila Hancock lives in London. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation