The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you'll read in 2023, Twelve Moons follows a year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide Northumberland skies. Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. She is at once alone and yet surrounded. Haydn Gwynne joins Nikki Bedi and Richard Coles. The actor talks about her latest role in The Great British Bake Off Musical. Since deciding to pursue acting in her mid-twenties, Gwynne has had a varied career on stage and screen, including playing Camilla in The Windsors. All of this covers the time of global crisis during the pandemic. She evokes the lives of her 4 amazing daughters, The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One with honesty, compassion and clarity. In fact, the calm and chaos of their lives mirror the ebb and flow of the tides and the lunar cycle beautifully. The nature descriptions of landscape, sea and sky are breathtakingly realistic. Navigating single parenthood, advocating from her girls and herself - an endless battle to be heard - is isolating and exhausting. Yet we see, she is gravity to the four girls in orbit around her, her own anxiety waxing and waning over the months, as the landscape around them and the turn of the seasons become her refuge.

Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky by Caro Giles - Goodreads

Award winning composer Peter Raeburn’s work has ranged from films such as Sexy Beast to adverts including Guinness Surfer. Peter’s forthcoming album Recovery is based on his personal experiences after having life-saving brain-surgery. The cycle of the same routines we all go through, even when big things change, we still carry on doing the same daily things with the same people. In these hours when the world is sleeping, I feel invincible. I am a mother of course, but I am also the promise of my own future, of who I can become. As I sit and watch the shadows cast from the candles, I see myself dancing, skirt spinning, hair caught in the wind, and I know that a better version of me is emerging .’ Lavi pa fasil. Life is hard.” A stone’s throw from hotels and a paradise of beaches, fifteen-year-old Noemi lives in the slums of Mauritius, where ends are met by whatever means necessary. This includes working alongside her mother as a maid at the wealthy De Grandbourg house nearby, where an encounter with a boy changes the course of her life.Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops Addington and Ellis argue for a noble cause, but Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, does not allow them to be idols. They can be jealous, selfish and lustful, obsessing over intellectual arguments (the works of Walt Whitman and the ancient Greeks feature often) rather than considering how their choices will affect their loved ones. This complexity of character makes The New Life an adroit novel of ethics. “Her face injured him with its familiarity,” Crewe writes of Catherine, Addington’s wife. “‘I did not marry for this,’ she said.” TWELVE MOONS follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives. A dazzlingly honest memoir that while never turning away from the awkward truths of life, also shows how love will flourish if we can only find a space for ourselves.

How the head of MI6 tried to derail Charles Haughey’s career

To hold our children close, as the worlds both outside and inside feel increasingly threatening; confusing; overwhelming? There is such poetry to this book; such grace in the way Giles writes of her past; her children; her fears; her hopes. Here is a woman who knows what it means to sit with her own experiences — those that rattle us and leave us changed — and not shy away from the invitation to transformation such things carry in their wake. I feel humbled to be let in on this year of her life; a year that affected some members of our communities in ways that perhaps others were not quite aware of. Carers were placed in positions that no-one should ever have to be put in. I watched from my own position of relative ease as friends fought for the respite they so desperately needed; for even very basic support for their children; for people to simply listen to, and trust them, when it came to the small people for which they were caring day in, day out.

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

Twelve Moons | Caro Giles | 9780008543242 | NetGalley Twelve Moons | Caro Giles | 9780008543242 | NetGalley

Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. She is at once alone and yet surrounded. Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her. We’re very excited to welcome writer Caro Giles to celebrate the release of her debut book, Twelve Moons: A Year Under A Shared Sky. Twelve Moons is a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone. When I stand and stare up at the moon, I can imagine kindred spirits doing the same, and I feel less alone.’ A dazzlingly honest memoir that while never turning away from the awkward truths of life, also shows how love will flourish if we can only find a space for ourselves. Set against windswept beaches and ancient hills of Northumberland, this is a story steeped in nature and landscape.A memoir told over 12 moons. A newly single mom and her 4 daughters (including one with specific needs) navigate their small town lifestyle with lots of nature hikes, singing, occasional quarantines, and ocean swimming. Sometimes the use of candles and their mystical power is a bit too much, but this mother's fortitude is incredible. This balance between motherhood and desiring individual freedom is something returned to throughout the text. The question of how can we do or be both is a powerful one. The answer is elusive, but part of it seems to be attached in the solace of the landscape, the wilderness of the Northumberland coast where the writer lives and, of course, the moon. The familiar certainty of its stages helped provide a certainty and reassurance in contrast to the unpredictability of life. It is, figuratively and literally, a light in the dark. Descriptions of the natural world permeate the novel, charting the ebbs and flows of the family’s life across a whole year. They are beautifully drawn and highlight the necessity of place in allowing fullness of life to take place whilst providing restoration for all the protagonists. It is here they can be truly themselves; the book felt just as much a love letter to the natural landscape as it did to her daughters. The chapters lead us through the year’s moons and their phases, which unites things cleverly - an unexpectedly grounding device. No surprise that I, a nature lover, found joy in the descriptions of the natural world. The healing qualities of the non-human are well shown here. As for the humans in this book, this is an overwhelmingly female and feminine tale. But I hope that many other men will find their way to this book, as I did. The big messages of this book - love, recovery, independence, tenacity - are important for all of us. I don’t think I’ve ever met a creative woman who wasn’t into the moon. This book is, at its core — a love story between a woman; a creative; a mother — and the moon. It is also a telling of the way life can be shaped by circumstances outside of our control; impacted on by people, events and things we have no way of influencing. More so, though, it is a story of how one person — perhaps particularly a mother — holds, within their busy, tired hands – the power to change the world; to take a dark time and make it shine. Set over the course of a year and charting her life as a single parent raising her four daughters, Twelve Moons is a stunning debut novel.