Description
Book SynopsisMy mother once said to me, ‘I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.’
I thought about it. Realised we could all learn from being in another person’s head for eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds inside Grandma Roberts’ head as she sat alone with her evening cup of tea, us girls upstairs in bed. Eighteen seconds inside one-year-old Colin’s head when he woke up in a foster home without his family. Eighteen seconds inside the head of a girl waiting for her bedroom door to open.
Writer, Louise Beech, looks back on the events that led to the day her mother wrote down her last words, then jumped off the Humber Bridge. She missed witnessing the horror herself by minutes.
Louise recounts the pain and trauma of her childhood alongside her love for her siblings with a delicious dark humour and a profound voice of hope for the future.
Early Praise for Eighteen Seconds
‘Upsetting, uplifting and inspiring’ John Marrs
‘Authentic, unflinching and moving. Written with compassion and humanity and a great deal of love’ S. E. Lynes
‘A powerful memoir making sense of a complicated childhood’ Madeleine Black
‘Haunting, brave and brilliant’ Gill Paul
‘A heart-breaking, heart-warming story – what courage to tell it, and tell it so well’ Liz Nugent
‘I loved every word of this haunting memoir’ Amanda Prowse
Trade Review‘Upsetting, uplifting and inspiring’
* John Marrs *
‘Authentic, unflinching and moving. Written with compassion and humanity and a great deal of love’
* S. E. Lynes *
‘A powerful memoir making sense of a complicated childhood’
* Madeleine Black *
‘Haunting, brave and brilliant’
* Gill Paul *
‘A heart-breaking, heart-warming story – what courage to tell it, and tell it so well’
* Liz Nugent *
‘I loved every word of this haunting memoir’
* Amanda Prowse *
'Exquisitely told, achingly painful, searingly honest and yet hopeful, and filled with light and love'
* Liz Fenwick *
'Having read some of Louise’s books before, I can now see where bits of her life have been threaded into her stories. But it’s not a thread of darkness; rather it’s a thread of hope, and daffodil yellow in colour. And that’s what we have in Eighteen Seconds. Against the darkness, is the light of hope and freedom shining through. A determination not to be defined by the horrific neglect and abuse that Louise and her siblings endured. There were times that this book made me so angry with everything that Louise has gone through. But I was left with the overriding bond and love that Louise has with her sisters and brother.'
* Joy Kluver, author of Last Seen, Broken Girls, Left for Dead *
‘Brave, powerful, horrifying and hopeful. Louise Beech tells her story with humour and heart despite enduring the most difficult of times.’
* Chris Whitaker, bestselling author of Tall Oaks *
