Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets./So why is everything broken? Why is Martha – on the edge of forty – friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?/Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe – as she has long believed – there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain./Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix – or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself./‘The most wonderful, heartbreakingly gorgeous novel of the year’ Elizabeth Day/‘I wanted to send it to everyone I know’ Ann Patchett
