“In beautiful prose, Tanya Shadrick writes her own fairy tale of becoming. She is fearless in her depiction of female desire – I think many women will find themselves in these pages.”

Katherine May, author of Wintering

“Such a bold, brave, and beautiful story about birth, death, rebirth and building a larger life”

Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood

“I love this book. Tanya’s story is moving and inspiring. Her thoughts and writing are well considered, courageous and true: real art. Just reading her is pleasure”

Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun

“I finished this wonderful book with tears in my eyes. A book about daring to be, daring to head out, to encounter truths and to understand what place desire must have and must not have in a life. It is beautifully written, both careful and passionate, both slight and strong in its gestures like the best of art, and astonishingly, heartrendingly open. Intensity, beauty, subtlety, pain and courage – all are here.”

Adam Nicolson, author of The Making of Poetry

“This is a book of women and words; homes and honesty; light and longing. A life laid bare, held to the morning light and given to us as reminder of what it means to choose to live. Shadrick weaves the raw beauty of the day to day with the magic of myth and fairy tale to offer us way through the darkest woods”

Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places

“How to live. How to die. How to reach back with understanding, even as we were going beyond the ones we’d loved. In that perpetual minute which I believed might be my last, time past spread itself out like a quilt. I held my life to the light, studying its pattern and rips and repairs. Determined – if only for my own self-respect – to die wise, clear-sighted. The most awake I’d ever been.”

The Cure for Sleep: a late-waking life