Amanda is best known for being the author of 28 novels, but although this is a memoir, it is just as engaging a read. We go through all the emotions with her as she grows up, having to endure ten operations between the ages of thirteen and eighteen to correct a congenital pelvic condition. I felt so sorry for her reading this section.

I will be honest - Amanda Prowse’s name was familiar to me, but I didn’t know who she was (in fact, I thought she was an actress, not an author). So, saying that I went into this book completely blind - when there also wasn’t a description - is extremely accurate. I thought, from the title, this would be some short stories under the over-arching umbrella of stories about women - possibly about her or possibly about women in her life. Without wanting to give too much away, because I would urge anyone reading this to read the book themselves, Amanda's life has had huge amounts of love poured into it by her wonderful family and husband.

Advance Praise

Krik Krak’s epilogue isn’t so much a story as it is an internal conversation an unidentified woman has with herself. Knowing what we know about Edwidge Danticat’s personal history, the most probable narrator of “Women Like Us” is Danticat herself. Like the woman in the epilogue, Danticat also struggled with telling her parents her dreams of being a writer. When the narrator’s mother says, “the family needs a nurse,” the words sound like something Danticat’s own mother could’ve said to her (Danticat 220). And the woman’s determination to continue on writing despite her mother’s protestations, because she thinks if she doesn’t write the stories “the sky would fall on [her] head” (Danticat 222), sounds like it comes from personal experience.

Tears streamed down my cheeks as the realisation hit that some situations hit much closer to home than others. I've been there before, too, and maybe, I'm there right now.

Jenn Ashworth outside her former high school in Penwortham, Lancashire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian