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
