"Beautifully thoughtful and empathetic this memoir centres around the death of the author’s husband with the years before and after highlighting grief and pain alongside joy, love, creativity, home and family."
Not only an incredibly personal and intimate story, this memoir by fiction author Hannah Richell opens its arms wide to gather in and connect to those living with grief. If you have already explored A Manual for Heartache by Cathy Rentzenbrink and I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This by Clare Mackintosh, then do step into An Ocean and a Day. It charts the story of the author meeting and falling in love with her husband in 2001 through to his death in 2014 followed by her grief and life with her young children through to 2024. Moving backwards and forwards in time, from England to Australia and back again, sets the devastation of death at the centre of a wide circle of life. She talks openly and honestly about death, she also opens her heart and her memories which are full of love, creativity, and compassion. It is often the small and seemingly inconsequential yet beautifully described moments that radiate with importance and centres the things that really matter. The author’s eloquence allowed me to connect to the story, to meet her husband and children, to read in essence a love story. And so, while those experiencing grief will feel an immediate connection, it can also be read as a tale of hope. Chosen as a LoveReading Star Book, An Ocean and a Day is a memoir of life and death, heartbreak and hope, and its beautiful.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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Hannah Richell was lost in writing her new novel when the outside world finally broke in to tell her that her husband, Matt, had been killed in a surfing accident. This is the story of the grief journey she travelled over the first two years of loss, but it is also an account of what happens beyond those early years, when time and distance have offered some perspective and healing.
Not just a love letter to her late husband, but a love letter to the country that stole her heart, to motherhood, and to the healing power of creative endeavours. More than anything, it's a story of recovery and hope.
An Ocean and a Day features in the following genres: Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Star Books, Biographies & Autobiographies, Self Help and Personal Development, Memoirs, Coping with / advice about death and bereavement, Autobiography: writers
An Ocean and a Day is available in Paperback
An Ocean and a Day was written by Hannah Richell and published by Bedford Square Publishers
An Ocean and a Day has 304 pages
£15.29
