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

Product Information

Written with intelligence - a blend of lightness, elegance, and even the elegiac, Twelve Moons immerses you in the Northumbrian landscape, with excursions to other quiet places. They are beautifully drawn and highlight the necessity of place in allowing fullness of life to take place whilst providing restoration for all the protagonists.

Twelve Moons is one of those stories - a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone. 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.

TWELVE MOONS follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives.

The chapters lead us through the year’s moons and their phases, which unites things cleverly - an unexpectedly grounding device. Twelve Moons is one of those stories a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone.

Set over the course of a year and charting her life as a single parent raising her four daughters, Twelve Moons is a stunning debut novel. Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones – and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. Given that she is writing so close to the traumas and challenges, there is a rawness in Twelve Moons that makes for challenging reading at times.

Finally, in addition to these conflicting emotions regarding the tone of the book, I found myself a little frustrated by some repetitious phrasing and inconsistencies in terms of timelines. Very often home schooling can be one the very few options available to parents finding themselves in this situation and as Giles highlights for all its potential joys, it can be all consuming and immersive. I hadn’t thought to look for it, to decide to make time for it, to recognise it in a world that is so busy. It is clear from her writing that Giles is a very anxious and often deeply unhappy person, and whether it was her intention or not, this element of her character held centre stage throughout the narrative. Descriptions of the natural world permeate the novel, charting the ebbs and flows of the family’s life across a whole year.I understand that the purpose of the book was for Giles to explore who she was in the wake of her separation. 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.