Cathy Rentzenbrink

This is a moving, funny and joyous exploration of how books can change the course of your life, packed with recommendations from one reader to another

The Comfort and Joy of Books

Dear Reader

In the summer of 1990, Cathy's brother Matty was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out. It was two weeks before his GCSE results, which turned out to be the best in his school. Sitting by his unconscious body in hospital, holding his hand and watching his heartbeat on the monitors, Cathy and her parents willed him to survive. They did not know then that there are many and various fates worse than death. This is the story of what happened to Cathy and her brother, and the unimaginable decision that she and her parents had to make eight years after the night that changed everything. It's a story for anyone who has ever watched someone suffer or lost someone they loved or lived through a painful time that left them forever changed. Told with boundless warmth and affection, The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink is a heartbreaking yet uplifting testament to a family's survival and the price we pay for love.

The Last Act of Love

'I devoured A Manual for Heartache in one sitting . . . a kind, honest and wise book about how to make a friend of sadness.' Rachel JoyceWhen Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. In A Manual for Heartache she describes how she learnt to live with grief and loss and find joy in the world again. She explores how to cope with life at its most difficult and overwhelming and how we can emerge from suffering forever changed, but filled with hope.This is a moving, warm and uplifting book that offers solidarity and comfort to anyone going through a painful time, whatever it might be. It's a book that will help to soothe an aching heart and assure its readers that they're not alone.

A Manual for Heartache

Why do we want to write and what stops us? How does the urge to express ourselves fight with the worry that no-one will care or that we will get in trouble? How do we identify and overcome everything that gets in our way so we can start making work? Sunday Times bestselling author Cathy Rentzenbrink shows you how to tackle all this and more in Write It All Down, a guide to putting your life on the page. This is a kind, encouraging and stimulating book that explores the nature of memoir writing and offers helpful guidance on how to write your life on paper. Rentzenbrink will help you to discover the pleasure and solace to be found in writing; the profound satisfaction of wrestling a story onto a page and seeing the events of your life transformed through the experience of writing the self. Perfect for both seasoned writers as well as writing amateurs and everyone in between, this helpful handbook will steer you through the philosophical and practical challenges of writing the self. Intertwined with reflections, anecdotes and exercises, Write It All Down is at once an intimate and enjoyable narrative and an invitation to share your story.

How to Put Your Life on the Page

Write It All Down

Everyone Is Still Alive

Margaret Kennedy

The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious, first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors, each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away, but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years, and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth... Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.

The Feast

het verhaal van mijn broer en zijn zus

Het laatste uit liefde

Victoria Hennison

Original tales by remarkable writers Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home In these pages on Yorkshire, you'll find two unique memoirs. 'The Yorkshire Years' is Cathy Rentzenbrink's deeply moving account of returning to Snaith, where her brother Matty was knocked down by a car over twenty years before. 'The Island upon the Moor' traces a powerful journey - from a carefree childhood in the village of Holme-upon-Spalding Moor - to surviving dark periods of depression, by Victoria Hennison.

Hometown Tales: Yorkshire

A lo largo de nuestra vida, todos nos cruzamos con la pérdida y la tristeza, pero ¿qué decir cuando alguien a quien queremos lo está pasando mal? ¿Cómo afrontamos esa situación cuando nos sucede a nosotros mismos? En El arte de curar un corazón, Cathy Rentzenbrink nos cuenta cómo aprendió a vivir con el dolor de perder a su hermano y pudo volver a ser feliz a pesar de tener el corazón roto. El resultado es una guía de supervivencia para tiempos difíciles que ofrecerá un poco de luz a un día oscuro y te recordará que no estás solo. Este es un libro conmovedor que tiende la mano a cualquiera que esté en un momento complicado y ayuda a calmar un alma que sufre.

Una guía imperfecta para asimilar las pequeñas y las grandes pérdidas de la vida

El arte de curar un corazón

En stark och rörande berättelse om en oerhört smärtsam familjetragedi. Sommaren 1990 blev Cathys älskade bror påkörd av en bil. Han dog inte, men åtta år senare måste familjen fatta ett omänskligt svårt beslut. Extraordinary An honest, heartbreaking uplifting account of a family tragedy. Read it! Jojo Moyes, författare Profoundly moving ... The books real power lies in Rentzenbrinks skill as a writer, her ability to unearth precise and agonising details quietly, with no self-pity or drama ... it falls into a tradition of beautifully written accounts of grief, such as Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking ... Sunday Times This is a book you may want to re-read during a tough time to make you feel less alone. Observer Surely the bravest, most moving book you will read all year. Daily Express

Cathy Rentzenbrink

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