Twelve Months and a Day

Rasmus and Jay, Róisín and Nico – two beautiful, ordinary love stories, cut short by death. Jay and Nico don’t even believe in ghosts, yet they seem to be… still here. Still in love with Rasmus and Róisín. And maddeningly powerless.
Both are incapable of leaving the living alone: Jay plays matchmaker, convinced that Rasmus and Róisín can heal each other; Nico, plagued by jealousy, doesn’t agree.
Rasmus and Róisín, meanwhile, are just trying to navigate their newly widowed lives. They don’t know what’s going. Or perhaps they do. All four of them are thinking the same thing: what is love, after death? What is it for? And what are we to do with it?
This moving, thought-provoking, playful and bittersweet novel is a Truly, Madly, Deeply for our times, showcasing one of Britain’s finest contemporary writers at her very best.
(My publishers say this. I couldn’t possibly comment.)
I’ve always felt that you have to laugh or else you’d cry. Of course you don’t always get the choice. But anyone who’s lived through grief knows that though people die, love doesn’t. And love is good. And grief is boring and horrible. And there are so many ways to live through it, live with it, learn to get along with it, and, if you’re a writer, write about it. So having written it straight, I decided to write it differently.
What if, it began, as always. What if people don’t die just like that, but drift away over a period of time? What if spirits lurk? (They do. I know they do. The veil can be so thin, around the time of death, during the Year of Magical Thinking.) So, what if these spirits are conscious? What if they have feelings, and opinions, and — oh, arguments with each other? I took the playful romantic spirit of British Classics such as Truly Madly Deeply, Blithe Spirit and The Ghost and Mrs Muir, added a spot of the movie Coco, and took the leap: two of my main characters are dead. And here it is: my poignant literary romcom, Twelve Months and a Day.
The title is from an old folksong, The Unquiet Grave:
I’ll do as much for my true love
As any young man may
I’ll sit and mourn all on her grave
For twelve months and a day
The twelve months and the day being gone
A voice spoke from the deep
Who is it sits all on my grave
And will not let me sleep?
Also available as an audiobook, read (and sung) by the incomparable Isabel Adomakoh Young.
A beautiful book. Insanely romantic and utterly convincing
Julie Myerson
A wonderful novel, charming and surprising, filled with loss and its triumphant opposites
Susie Boyt
A wonderful and inventive novel, sorrowful and hopeful in equal measure. It was a true pleasure to read
Miranda Cowley Heller
A skilfully calibrated love-after-death tale, it’s a four-course feast of hearts broken, hearts mended, of songs, laughter, old regrets and fresh desire, that demands a major film deal
Patrick Gale
A tale of two love stories with a supernatural twist, Twelve Months and a Day is poignant and sad as well as funny and beautifully written and imagined. What if our beloveds lived on as ghosts and watched us grieve, what if they never really leave us, and what if some of these ghosts even meet? You will fall in love again as you read this clever book by a writer who understands grief. Hugely engaging and readable. A bitter-sweet pang in my heart as it ended. A page-turner
Monique Roffey
Louisa Young is the great chronicler of romantic love and the pain of its loss
Linda Grant
Louisa Young is the great chronicler of romantic love and the pain of its loss
Elizabeth Buchan
What a writer. A raw and beautiful exposition on grief and loss but so beautifully earthed in the everyday. Terrific
Elizabeth Buchan

You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol

Louisa Young first met Robert Lockhart when they were 17. Their stop-start romance lasted decades, in which time he became a celebrated composer and she, an acclaimed novelist. Always snapping at their heels was Robert’s alcoholism, a helpless, ferocious dependency that affected his personality before crippling and finally, despite five years of hard-won sobriety, killing him.
There are a million love stories, and a million stories of addiction. This one is truly transcendent. It is at once a compelling portrait of a unique and charismatic man; a bittersweet reflection on an all-consuming love affair; and a completely honest and incredibly affecting guide to how the partner of an alcoholic can possibly survive when the disease rips both their lives apart. This is a hugely important book – raw and unflinching but also uplifting and elegiac, it should be essential reading for anybody who’s ever lost someone they loved.
Read an interview with Louisa Young here
Spectacular. I can’t stop thinking about it. Louisa Young is a beautiful, beautiful writer and there is great courage and love in the way she addresses her subject. It’s the portrait of a man and his times and his illness told with love but also with an unflinching honesty that feels like a great gift to the reader.
Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love
I’m still fucking crying
Philippa Perry
The most riveting, heartbreaking book I’ve ever read about addiction, but above all about the nature of love. Already one of my books of the year
Linda Grant
If the greatest act of devotion is to conjure the dead beloved in all their vivid, imperfect, mesmerising humanity, then Louisa Young’s book is a memorial to equal the Taj Mahal. Anyone who has ever loved an alcoholic (be that a partner, parent, friend or relative) will find that the author’s insights and breathtaking honesty will salve their wounds, as well as help them better understand the most devastating of addictions
Rowan Pelling
Louisa Young’s memoir of her long, bruising love for musical genius Robert Lockhart is as honest as the morning after and the best account of loving against all sense since Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater
Patrick Gale
I am upset, astonished, compelled, grateful. The sheer work of loving comes through, the understanding that it took. The toll. And yet she continues to spread the understanding. Quite brilliant
Suzanne Moore
Oh my God, it’s so beautiful, and heartbreaking, and true
Sam Baker, The Pool

My Dear I Wanted To Tell You

Richard & Judy Bookclub Choice 2012 / Waterstone’s ‘This Week’s Must Read’ / BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice / Shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize, the Galaxy Book of the Year, and the Costa Novel of the Year. Winner of the Galaxy Audiobook of the Year.
While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: every day Julia prepares for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises – but how can they when their future is completely out of their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men are dead?
‘My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’  is a big First World War novel, moving between Ypres, Amiens, London, Paris, Lancashire and Kent to tell of the experiences of women left at home as much as those of men in the trenches. It is the first of a series observing – through the descendents of Peter, Julia, Riley, Nadine, Rose and others – ways in which the experiences of that massively traumatic period and its aftermath shaped the following generations: all of us who grew up in the twentieth century.The title comes from a standard letter which was provided to soldiers who were wounded and admitted to hospital.
Powerful, sometimes shocking, boldly conceived, and irradiated by anger and pity 
Sunday Times
Divine
The Times
Compelling and deeply moving
the Observer
Palpable, frightening, inspiring and painful. there are echoes here of Rebecca West… the core of the book is a love story built on rich strange details of the first world war
Guardian
Unmissable
Marie Claire
Birdsong for the new millennium
The Times
Weaves heartbreakingly painful irony, heroic sacrifice, human weakness, vanity, tragedy and the purest of loves – you’ll be left sobbing and grasping on to any hope…
Easy Living
This is the finest Great War novel since Susan Hill’s Strange Meeting… (it) encompasses themes of shifting perceptions of class; of the enduring, insistent consolation of art; of incorrigible wiliness; of unflinching duty and endurance; of the need to maintain a sense of identity when everything militates against its, and of selfless generosity, optimism and intense passion. Her research is meticulous, sometimes harrowing. The atmosphere she creates is often appalling, always compelling and her narrative drive is powerful enough to keep you up all night.
Independent on Sunday
From the Readers:
She has caught the ethos of the first world war extraordinarily well: the vast gap between the unspeakable horror of the trenches, and the drudgery overlaid by the chronic anxiety of the people left at home. Also the vast conspiracy of silence that was preserved by those fighting to protect the people they were fighting for. Young also writes very well and convincingly about that well-worn subject love, making it fresh and real and alive. All in all, this novel is a triumph.
Elizabeth Jane Howard
My Dear I Wanted To Tell You is one of those books that doesn’t leave you, and probably never will. So deep was the place it touched in my heart, that I wanted to keep the book itself close by; as if I could comfort each character and keep them tightly held. Many writers have set out describe war’s dark, lingering shadow, though few have truly succeeded. In this story of lives torn apart by the horror of the Great War, where even the soul struggles to rise amid the detritus of battle, Louisa Young proves herself to be one of those writers, and she has told this story very, very well.
Jacqueline Winspear
 

The Heroes’ Welcome

London, 1919. In a flurry of spring blossom, Nadine Waveney and Riley Purefoy are married. Those who have survived the war are, in a way, home, But Riley is wounded and disfigured, normality seems incomprehensible, and love unfathomable. Honeymooning an a battered liberated Europe, they long for a marriage made of love and passion rather than dependence and pity. In Kent, Riley’s former CO, Major Peter Locke, is obsessed by Homer. His hysterical wife, Julia, and the ouyng son they barely know attempt to navigate family life but are confounded by the ghosts and memories of Peter’s war. despite all this, there is a glimmer of a real future in the distance: Rose Locke, Peter’s cousin and Riley’s former nurse, finds that independence might be hers for the taken, after all. For those who fought, those who helped, and those left behind, 1919 is a year of accepting realities, holding on to hope, and reaching after new beginnings.
‘The Heroes’ Welcome’ is the second of the series that opens with ‘My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’.
From the press
If you read one novel about the effects of the First World War this year, make it this one
The Times
Young possesses in abundance emotional conviction, pace and imaginative energy
The Guardian
[A] tender, elegiac novel. Others have been here before, of course, from Sebastian Faulks to Pat Barker, but Young belongs in their company
Mail on Sunday
From Readers
Brilliant, passionate and intense
Elizabeth Buchan
Loved every minute of this wonderful sequel. From page one you open the door to a past and immediately unite with it. Brilliant and beautifully written with words which linger long after the book is done.
Reader
This book is a brilliant follow up to the excellent ‘My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’ . . . In both volumes there is a very cleverly told parallel which emphasises the physical and mental traumas which not only the returning soldiers but also their families must contend with. The Heroes’ Welcome contains humour and suspense as well as tragedy. Louisa Young writes very well indeed. I feel as though I know these characters personally.
Reader

Devotion

Tom loves Nenna. Nenna loves her father. Her father loves Mussolini.
Ideals and conviction are not always so clear in the murky years between the end of WW1 and the beginning of WW2. For Tom and and Kitty Locke, children of the damaged WW1 generation, visiting their cousin Nenna in Rome is a pure joy. For their adoptive parents, Nadine and Riley, the ground is still shifting underfoot.
Nobody knew in 1919 that the children they were bearing would be just ripe for the next war in 1939; nobody knew, in 1935, the implications of an Italian Jewish family supporting Mussolini. Meanwhile Peter Locke and Mabel Zachary have found each other again in London, itself a city reborn but riddled with its own intolerances. As the heat rises across Europe, voices grow louder and everyone must brace themselves once more to decide what should bring them together, and what must drive them apart.
This is the third part of the series which begins with ‘My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’ and ‘The Heroes’ Welcome’..
From the Press

Young has conjured up another rich historical novel and I longed to know the fate of this tragic cast of friends. These characters demand devotion ― they’ll get it, too
The Times

A stirring story of war and its consequences … tender and convincing 
Mail on Sunday

Elegantly written and compulsively readable, Devotion manages to be both thrilling and heartfelt – a real treasure of a book
Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown Up

Young expertly weaves politics, race and loyalty into the family’s narrative… A sumptuous portrayal of love and war in fascist Rome
Observer

Powerful and evocative … a must-read
Woman and Home

Deeply moving … a great 20th-century saga
Saga Magazine

A gorgeously compelling story of family, love and race
Prima Magazine

From the readers
I hated coming to the end of this. The story, the characters are so engaging, and in this one there is obviously lots of scope for a fourth one in this sequence. (Does anyone know if she intends to write a follow on to this). This has been my favourite of this sequence (“My dear I wanted to tell you” “”Heroes’ Welcome” ) It touches my heart and conscience personally as so many characters hide from important things from the people closest to them, trying to be kind. The young love of Nenna and Tom is beautifully written, and the rehabilitation of Peter and ultimately his relationships with his children is fantastic. Absolutely gripping, strong believable story writing.

Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror

Mouse

She creaks to her knees to search in places she doesn’t always look. Behind the old cat food (it died) in the bottom shelf of the cupboard under the failing boiler there are a great many little black pellets and the nasty sweet smell. She vacuums, wipes, sprays everything with disinfectant, gently stuffs wire wool into the corners. Latex gloves and a mask, as experts recommend.

‘It’s nice how you do whatever I want,’ he says, looking at the telly. He’s dropped the remote. She gives it to him.

Hantaviruses infect the lining of blood vessels in the lungs, causing them to leak. Fluid fills the lungs so you can’t breathe. Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome is a severe sometimes fatal disease spread by rodent saliva, urine or feces. Inhalation is the most common way to become infected; other contamination routes include bite, touching, touching your mouth or eating food. Also known as Sin Nombre Virus, Convict Creek Virus, Muerto Canyon Virus, Four Corners Virus and colloquially Navajo Flu. Hantaviruses cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. The virus infects the heart, reducing its ability to pump blood leading to the failure of most or all of the organs and death. Symptoms: abrupt onset of fever, chills, weakness, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain followed by difficulty breathing, illness, death.

Who Is at Risk?

I am at risk, she thinks. All the symptoms are how she feels anyway. She laughs.

‘What are you laughing at?’ he calls from the couch. ‘Nothing,’ she says. He doesn’t like it when she says that.

Underground Tales for London

She Deserved It: A scrap of memoir set along the Hammersmith & City Line

Autobiographical jewels of mine hang from that pink ribbon as it ambles across the city. Think of them as coloured lightbulbs strung along frayed electric flex over a market stall; a long twist of Chinese lanterns glowing in the dusk; damp-stained gems of coloured diamanté dangling at intervals from a cheap foxed chain. A rosary of things that happened. The stations of the King’s Cross to Hammersmith stretch.

Think of London lying naked by the river, wearing everything that is inflicted on her. Decorated, damaged, ignited, weighted, chained, wounded, loved, undermined, traversed, surviving…

I am Heathcliff

In this anthology, curated by Kate Mosse and commissioned for Emily Bronte’s bicentenary year in 2018, sixteen modern fiction writers (contributors include Louise Doughty, Dorothy Koomson, Joanna Cannon, and Juno Dawson) shine startling lights on the romance and pain of the infamous literary pair Heathcliff and Cathy, in sixteen stories inspired by Wuthering Heights. In ‘Terminus’ a young woman hides in an empty Brighton hotel; in ‘Thicker Than Blood’ a man sits in a hot tub stalking his newly-married love on social media; and in ‘A bird half-eaten’ an amateur boxer prepares for a match. In ‘Anima’ a child and a fox are unified in one startling moment of violence; and in One Letter Different’ two teenagers walk the moors and face up to their respective buried secrets. In Louisa Young’s contribution, a woman recalls the ‘Heathcliffs I Have Known’ and the physical danger she has borne at their hands. These fresh, modern stories pulse with the beauty, pain and danger of love and desire, and are as timely as they are illuminating  
‘My heart soared a little higher on every page; it felt like a collective overthrowing of the pervasive idea that real love hurts. The most powerful story, Louisa Young’s Heathcliffs I Have Known, is a slow creep into horror that shares the zeitgeist of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. 
Erin Kelly, The Pool
‘Louisa Young’ furious, funny, righteous rant redresses the romantic hero myth’  
Eithne Farry, The Daily Mail

The Book of the Heart

Why, when the heart looks, anatomically, like a fleshy whoopie cushion, is it so often portrayed as a scallop-topped, pointy-ended pink emblem with an arrow through and a declaration of love written across it? ‘The Book of the Heart’ is the lavishly illustrated story of the human heart through time and across the world, and divided – like the actual heart – into four chambers: the anatomical, the religious, the artistic and the romantic. The first gives a history of anatomical knowledge of the heart, a factual account of its physical workings, a terrifying summary of diseases, and an overview of cardiac medicine from a Babylonian tablet of 2000BC until the era of transplant surgery.

The second chamber examines the heart as a religious and magical emblem. The Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Wounded Heart of Man, the Cult of the Sacred Heart, and Aztec human sacrifices are among Young’s topics. So, too, is cannibalism, including Mike Tyson’s threat to Lennox Lewis (‘I want to rip his heart out and feed it to him’), and the doom of Sir Charles McCarthy, who ordered his regimental band to play “God Save the King” as a signal to Ashanti warriors to disperse, for which misjudgement his heart was ceremonially eaten on the banks of the Bonsu river.

The third chamber looks at depiction of the heart and their meanings, and includes a heartfelt defence of kitsch in religious art. The fourth chamber celebrates lovers’ heart juxtaposing the prophet Jeremiah with Al Green (‘How can you mend a broken heart?’), and quoting Damien Hirst, Oscar Wilde, the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi and John Donne, among others. Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’ and The Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full of Soul’ jostle on the page with Matthew Arnold and a 15th-century King of Naples.

The book closes with macabre but gleeful notes on the fate of famous people’s hearts. A cat ate Thomas Hardy’s before it could be transferred to Westminster Abbey. Sir Nicholas Crisp’s was put in a monument at Hammersmith, and given a refreshing glass of wine on the anniversary of its entombment – a practice that was continued for 150 years.

‘The Book of the Heart’ inspired the first major exhibition at Wellcome Collection in London in 2007, which included video-linked live heart surgery. Louisa Young was curatorial consultant. ‘Motion of the Heart’, a masque staged by the early-music ensemble eX at the National Gallery in Dublin in 2009, was also inspired by the book.

From the press:

A ravishing, celebratory and funny history of the human heart… superb… Wise and gentle… Louisa Young really knows what she is talking about  
The Independent

Brilliantly provocative… a compact and beautifully illustrated book  
The Daily Telegraph

A fascinating engaging study of that vital organ and its depiction in art and literature  
The Irish Times

Wonderfully eclectic. Young’s range of reference is enormous and she is breezily at ease with it, moving nimbly from Burt Bacharach to Jeremiah in one sentence. The book is beautifully produced, there are numerous pictures, some startlingly strange, many beautiful. But although the book looks like a box of chocolates, and offers correspondingly assorted and delicious satisfactions, it is harder-centred than it appears. Young’s commentary on her material is astute and illuminating
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

‘The Book of the Heart’ makes emotive reading. It entranced me, and caused a lifestyle revolution. While reading it, I stopped using salt or butter, gave up booze, started jogging and, for the first time ever, started making doting daily phone calls to my Significant Other, hundreds of miles away. This ambitious book could so easily be pretentious, but instead remains disarming, canny and beguiling. It is like Jack Horner’s dream of a Christmas pie: wherever you put in your thumb, you will dig out the juiciest of plums  
The Independent

From the readers:
A lovely thing to give and a joy to receive… an exquisitely written, beautifully presented, wonderfully illustrated study of the heart form every aspect: physical, emotional and historical  
Wonderful chapters of everything one feels with the heart. Both profound and enriching. Essential reading for poets and artists   
 

A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott

This is Louisa Young’s biography of her grandmother. Famous for being the widow of Captain Scott of the Antarctic, Kathleen was also a talented professional sculptor who studied in Paris with Rodin. She led an excpetionally adventurous and unusual life for a woman of her time, and made friends with people as diverse as Bernard Shaw, Fritjof Nansen, the WW1 Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and dancer Isadora Duncan. Her sons were Sir Peter Scott the naturalist and writer, and politician Wayland Young, Lord Kennet. The biography is based on diaries Kathleen started in 1910 for Scott to read on his return; after his death she continued writing them, covering politics, exploration, art and her friends and family. 

Kathleen makes a cameo appearance in Louisa’s best-selling novel My Dear I Wanted to Tell You.

From the press:

 Kathleen Scott died in 1947, famous for being an explorer’s widow rather than a formidably gifted sculptress. This fascinating, racy book should set the record straight, presenting her as a personality in her own right and an artist to boot
Beryl Bainbridge, The Spectator

Her life was one with depth, richness and resonance – worth writing and worth reading about
Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph

It is impossible to put this book down… A woman of large horizons [Kathleen Scott] gallops through these pages unforgettably, large in character and spirit 
Frances Spalding, Sunday Times

An enthralling life 
Flora Fraser, The Times

Written with the brio of a latterday Mitford
Miranda Seymour, the Independent

From a reader

This biography of Kathleen Bruce is a loving testament by a granddaughter to her gifted independent, almost outrageous grandmother. It is probably the most riveting biography I have ever read. Very well researched and positively delightful to read. The enthralling adventures of this adventurous but very serious-minded woman are so fascinating. Every modern young woman who wishes to lead an independent life and engage in a serious profession should read this book. It is truly inspirational