When the person next to me started warning about the dangers of dating in early recovery, instead of listening I slipped out early and texted moustache man my address. Without romanticising addiction, Octavia Bright manages to walk us through her recovery with openness and vulnerability, which in turn made me examine myself closely.

It may sound like a small thing, but it was a revelation, and proof that all the work I’d put into my recovery was worth it. That evening at the meeting, my body was there in that east-London crypt, feet firmly on the flecked grey lino, but my mind was already with him. That’s not to say that I haven’t really enjoyed reading about addiction, but recovery always comes at the end, like the wedding in a romcom.

The opening passage, as he immerses himself in the moat of his Suffolk farmhouse during a downpour, gives the texture of both the man and his writing. The Green Transition Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. Great mastery of tone - whether the author is talking about her own alcoholism or her father's Alzheimers it feels like a single coherent world that we're living in as the reader.

Deakin was 56 when Waterlog was published but had already worked in, among other trades, advertising (the Coal Board slogan “Come home to a real fire” was his), furniture selling, music promoting and documentary making. As Octavia moves between London, the island of Stromboli, New York, Cornwall and Margate, each place offers something new but ultimately always delivers the same message: that wherever you go, you take yourself with you. Early school report cards lamented my tendency to daydream – the classic ‘Octavia shows great potential if only she’d apply herself’. The experience of being trapped in an addictive relationship to any substance is ultimately very monotonous, from a psychological point of view, even if you’re wearing cool clothes and surrounded by avant-garde people. this idea that as we evolve, somewhere deep within us remains a skeletal trace of what came before that builds up in layers, a sediment of the self.KG: I was reading Maggie Nelson ’s recent book On Freedom before this, and your story seems to echo her description of the liberation of the addict versus the freedom of recovery.

I didn’t understand it then, but at the time I was more interested in intensity than intimacy, which meant I went at everything full throttle, thirsty for a t ranscendence it was impossible for another person to provide. This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia's journey to recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father's descent into Alzheimer's.

She weaves introspection, philosophy and art into her beautifully written observations of the world in a way I found both enlightening and soothing. It was from a man with a luxuriant moustache I’d been talking to online – he wore loud shirts and had an eccentric way with capital letters that made me think he’d be a good distraction.

As a discrete section, her portrayal of his death, during the Covid-19 pandemic, is immensely poignant. They went from hangovers and bruised knees or the occasional failure to show up for a friend to dangerous encounters and accidents that needed treatment by doctors.By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. As though, after years of scratching away at it, I finally unlocked the door to a secret internal room that I could access whenever I need to feel the ground beneath my feet. this surpassed any expectations i may have had, such an incredible exploration of addiction and it’s impacts on livelihood. Grief is also such a hard topic to cover because how can something so big be put into words in a book, as Bright herself recognises.