Fran Littlewood
At a glance
Bernadette, Eleanor Oliphant, Rosie, Ove... meet Amazing Grace Adams, the funny, touching, unforgettable story of an invisible everywoman pushed to the brink―who finally pushes back.
Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled―the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian . And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away.
Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again. Because Grace Adams used to be amazing. Her husband thought so. Her daughter thought so. Even Grace thought so. But everyone seems to have forgotten. Grace is about to remind them . . . and, most important, remind herself.
"Littlewood writes with ferocity and compassion about . . . the impossibility of spinning all the plates that modern life expects us to manage. Read it and weep (then cheer)."
- The Times
"I finished her story on a plane above the country, so full, and in tears. “Ma’am?” my seat-mate asked, “are you ok?” “Oh, yes,” I answered. And gave him this book."
- Sarah Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Postmistress and The Guest Book
"An absolute gut punch of a book that throbs with all the rage of a middle-aged woman who refuses to go quietly."
- Red
Grace is hot. There’s the sun, like boiled breath, on the roof of her car, but it’s more than that. This feeling that from nowhere she’s been set on fire from the inside out. Between her breasts a line of sweat is tracking a slow, itchy S, and she wants to jam a hand under the neck of her shirt and wipe it away. It’s gridlock, though, and she’s hemmed in on all sides, and there’s the man in the Audi, whose car window is level with hers. He’s star- ing at her like she’s the distraction he needs in this. Screw you, she thinks. Screw you, screw you, screw you.
“If you’re feeling hot out there today,” the woman on the radio is saying, “according to the latest report from climate think tank Autonomy, it’s only going to get hotter...”
Grace revs the engine to drown out the words and her eyes find the clock on the dashboard: 12:23. Can that be right? She checks her phone on the passenger seat. Shit. She’s late. Really late. There’s the Love Island cake to pick up, the one she’s had specially made. The cake she can’t afford but is staking everything on. One, two, three, four....She begins the CBT count that doesn’t work—the half-remembered one from the online course she abandoned after the first few sessions—then takes a deep breath in through her nose. Now her jeans are sticking to her thighs. Grace fiddles with the vents, stabs yet again at the button for the air-con she knows isn’t working. It’s the cheap heat in the synthetic fabric that’s making it all worse and she spreads her knees as wide as they’ll go, trying to get some nonexistent air between her legs…
Child death, sexual assault.
