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Paperback | £9.99| 27 April 2023

ISBN:  9781837700202

Also available in ebook and audio

Eighteen Seconds

Louise Beech

A shocking and gripping memoir of horror, forgiveness and love

My mother once said to me, ‘I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.’

I thought about it. Realised we could all learn from being in another person’s head for eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds inside Grandma Roberts’ head as she sat alone with her evening cup of tea, us girls upstairs in bed.

 

Eighteen seconds inside one-year-old Colin’s head when he woke up in a foster home without his family. Eighteen seconds inside the head of a girl waiting for her bedroom door to open.

Writer, Louise Beech, looks back on the events that led to the day her mother wrote down her last words, then jumped off the Humber Bridge. She missed witnessing the horror herself by minutes.

Early Praise for Eighteen Seconds:

‘Upsetting, uplifting and inspiring’ John Marrs

‘Authentic, unflinching and moving. Written with compassion and humanity and a great deal of love’

S. E. Lynes

‘A powerful memoir making sense of a complicated childhood’ Madeleine Black

 ‘Haunting, brave and brilliant’ Gill Paul

‘A heart-breaking, heart-warming story – what courage to tell it, and tell it so well’ Liz Nugent

‘I loved every word of this haunting memoir’
Amanda Prowse

About the Author

Louise Beech lives in East Yorkshire and grew up dreaming of being a writer but it took many years and many rejections for her to finally get a book deal in 2015, aged 44. Her debut, How to be Brave, got to No4 on Amazon and was a Guardian Readers’ Pick; Maria in the Moon was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and longlisted for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl was Best magazine’s Book of the Year 2019; I Am Dust was a Crime Magazine Monthly Pick; and This Is How We Are Human was a Clare Mackintosh Book Club pick. In 2023 her new novel, End of Story, will be published under the pen name Louise Swanson. Louise regularly writes short stories for magazines, blogs, and talks at universities and literary events.

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