"All Grown Up is for all the Megs, Jos, Beths and Amys - and for every reader who grew up wanting to live inside the world of Little Women."
Opening with Louisa May Alcott’s plea, “Don’t try to make me grow up before my time”, Daisy Buchanan creates a clever, tender, modern homage to the March sisters, set in another world, another time, another universe - but carrying all the emotional truth of the original.
At the heart of the story is Louisa, a 49-year-old mother of four grown-up daughters, facing her first Christmas alone. Her birthday falls on Christmas Eve, but the bar for celebration is painfully low. After decades of giving everything to her family - “not even a thought” belonging solely to her anymore - she is quietly planning a rebellion: no Christmas this year.
Her daughters orbit around her. Feeling both beautifully familiar and heartbreakingly real. Sensible Meg is pregnant and leaving her husband. Jo is still the rebel. Amy has dropped out of University: lost, grieving and running herself into therapy, unable to stop thinking about Beth - “the sweet one, now the dead one.” Beth’s absence hangs over the novel like a shadow. Her death 18 months earlier has fractured the family in a myriad of ways. Buchanan writes so movingly about grief: how it sneaks into baths, runs, quiet moments and crowded rooms.
And yet this book is also warm, chaotic, funny and gloriously hopeful. Years of neighbourly history. Friendships full of “frogs and ponds and pasta and proms and pianos and love-fuelled neighbourly chaos.” There’s flirtation, unexpected romance and the delicious thrill of someone finally seeing Louisa again after years of losing herself to motherhood and survival.
Buchanan captures family life in all its messy contradictions: the love that saves us, suffocates us, breaks us and rebuilds us. The novel is about growing up. About being together and apart, about the families we are born into and the families we choose. It’s about mothers and daughters, grief and reinvention, marriage and loneliness, and the terrifying, exhilarating question of who we are once the people who need us most begin to leave.
Funny, sad, hopeful and wise, All Grown Up feels like sitting at a crowded kitchen table with people you know intimately by the final page. Meeting the March family - in any universe - feels like one of the luckiest things that can happen to a reader. Bravo Daisy.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
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'What a gorgeous book!' MARIAN KEYES
'Funny, tender and relatable' JENNIE GODFREY
'A warm hug of a novel' CLAIRE DAVERLEY
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After thirty long years, Louisa's daughters can finally look after themselves … or so she thinks.
Because suddenly, they're back - apparently for good. Meg's second-guessing her marriage. Jo's career hangs in the balance. Amy has inexplicably quit university. None of them empty the dishwasher.
Louisa knows it's time for some life lessons. She adores her girls, but if she's ever going to get her (sex) life back, they'll have to grow up - and go.
But maybe they're not the only ones with lessons to learn… And Louisa might just discover that her daughters have something to teach her about being an adult too.
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PRAISE FOR ALL GROWN UP . . .
'What a gorgeous book! Such a charming, warm, optimistic read. Just beautiful.' Marian Keyes
'Funny, tender & relatable at every level... quite simply, wonderful' Jennie Godfrey
'Wonderful, complex, bruising, rewarding... I snaffled it like cake on a rainy day, and enjoyed every morsel!' Amanda Prowse
'An absolute delight - impossibly funny, astute, candid and moving... brilliant.' Rosie Walsh
'Riotously funny, achingly tender... a book to treat yourself to.' Julia Raeside
'A warm hug of a novel that is going to make thousands of people both happy and tearful (in the best way)' Claire Daverley
'Truly fresh, wildly funny and completely charming... some of the most perceptive writing on motherhood I've ever read. I adored it.' Lauren Bravo
'Funny, moving, and wonderfully tender... a joyful reminder that growing up never really ends.' Louise O'Neill
'What a beautifully-observed, funny and relatable novel.' Sophia Money-Coutts
'Gorgeous from the first page to the last. . . Emotional, funny & chaotic.' Georgina Moore
'Lots of books are described as comforting but this book brought me genuine, genuine comfort: the perfect blend of familiar and the contemporary. It takes one hell of a writer to take on Little Women, but Daisy is one hell of a writer.' Caroline Corcoran
All Grown Up features in the following genres: Star Books, Family Drama, General Fiction, Literary Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Fiction: inspired by or adapted from other media
All Grown Up is available in Paperback, Hardback
All Grown Up was written by Daisy Buchanan and published by Penguin Books an imprint of Cornerstone
All Grown Up has 400 pages
£8.99
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