“Fearless in her depiction of female desire – many women will find themselves in these pages”
Katherine May
“A bold, brave, and beautiful story about birth, death, rebirth and building a larger life”
Charlie Gilmour
“A story about struggle, class, opportunity (taken and wasted), art, sex and desire. About how to live, once you’ve faced down death, and how to love. In laying out her life, Tanya has created a book with the capacity to change yours”
Jenny Landreth, author Swell: A Waterbiography
“Such lovely observations on familial love and motherhood – and being alive”
Kit de Waal, author of My Name is Leon
“A daring and enchantingly written blend of memoir and self-help, which urges us to consider, at any age, breaking the spell of our inherited longings for love, approval, safety and rescue, and doing what we are actually called to do with our one wild and precious life”
Caroline Sanderson, an Editor’s Choice in The Bookseller
“This book is absolutely magnificent. Heartfelt, beautiful. I read it compulsively”
Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat
“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
“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
“This is a book of women and words; homes and honesty; light and longing. A life laid bare 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 a 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
tanya shadrick 