Twelve Moons: The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you’ll read in 2023

Product Information

The authors are excited for the change their radical work might bring about, until Oscar Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency unnerves them. Battered by the agonies of divorce and battling a bureaucratic system at odds with her children’s needs, with Covid lingering outside, Giles draws on the natural world to bring light and hope to her tightly knit tribe. Farnham, whose formidable credits include the Royal Opera House and the Royal Ballet, describes just how one conducts in accessible, engaging language. This line initially made me feel all the anger I had experienced with education systems but also a sense of it being a uniquely female burden of blame. An exquisitely and bravely written memoir following the lives of a single mother and her four beautiful daughters, during a year of the pandemic.

Twelve Moons: A year under a shared sky eBook : Giles, Caro

I told her that reading memoirs like this make me feel less alone, in sisterhood with others who tread the wild pathways too. 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.

The Green Transition Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team.

Twelve Moons | Caught by the River | Caught by the River Twelve Moons | Caught by the River | Caught by the River

I enjoyed some of the repetitive bits, like letting the cat in and out because it felt like the chance to get quite familiar with her and her daily life.A passage in which the author describes having to de-register one of her children from school by the age of six was particularly emotive and hard-hitting.

A single mum and her girls go wild up north - PressReader

On the inhale it is rich with the beauty of her world, the ugliness of the divide between rich and poor; on the exhale it is musical, powerful, and bitterly melancholic. If Little Women had been written from the perspective of Marmee March – and Marmee was undergoing a divorce in the 21st-century Northumberland countryside – then it might have read a lot like Caro Giles’ Twelve Moons. 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. This memoir of Caro Giles is written in such a tone that you can't help but fall in love with her family, the moon and the landscapes of Northumberland. 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.

Battles with illness, finances, bureaucracy and a broken heart all threaten to undo their tight-knit family unit, which seems as fragile as it is bold – but an insistence on making time for sensory, immersive experiences (from sea-swimming to singing) creates tides that pull them repeatedly back together. The challenges of bringing up a young family in isolated Northumberland are laid bare with brutal and heart-rending honesty.