Chloe Hooper

From the best-selling author of The Tall Man and The Arsonist, a personal tale about death, life and the enchantment of stories. With illustrations by Anna Walker. Let me tell you a story... When Chloe Hooper's partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children's literature--with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals--can teach about grief and resilience in real life. As she discovers, 'the right words are an incantation, a spell of hope for the future.' From the Brothers Grimm to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Tolkien and Dahl--all of whom suffered childhood bereavements--she follows the breadcrumbs of the world's favourite authors, searching for the deep wisdom in their books and lives. Both memoir and manual, Bedtime Story is stunningly illustrated by the New York Times award-winning Anna Walker. In an age of worldwide uncertainty, here is a profound and moving exploration of the dark and light of storytelling. 'This book is a miracle of light and meaning-making from one of our finest writers. Venturing inward with extraordinary grace, Hooper explores - and extends - the long literary line surging with our deepest inherited wisdom about how to embrace our finite lives. The result is nothing less than the hero's journey we have been collectively starving for. Telling you this is like trying to describe the sun; it is a book so powerful and beautiful - so utterly its own - that it can only be experienced directly.' Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer 'Exquisitely beautiful. This book is an act of love.' Anna Funder, author of All That I Am and Stasiland 'Deeply engrossing and honest, human, full of love and tenderness, with moments of sparkling humour in the struggle. I loved everything about Bedtime Story. I loved particularly what it taught me about authors who write for children, the ways that writing and reading provides compensation, balancing the scales between loss and love.' Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye of the Sheep and Too Loud Lily

Bedtime Story

Beatrix

Through tears you say, ‘I’m stranded in my bed with a dream in my head!’

What daytime tames, the dark untames… The stillness feels alive, as if each thing is deciding how to behave.

 Just because you hadn't seen such a spectacle didn't mean it wasn't possible. For young children, there's barely a division between the real and the imagined anyway. Being a fantasist holds no shame.

It's after school. You’re in your socks, pretending a red balloon it: football. To kick it, you raise one leg like a dancer before dashine up, arms outstretched, to retrieve it. ‘He does move beautifully’, your father will admit occasionally, allowing himself only brietiy to show the gods what he best loves.

You don’t sit down. You don’t yet know you’re meant to sit down when people deliver bad news.

We sit, half reading, the exposure of my barbarism another layer of tension.

When children are small, parents aren't really dimensional. They're yeses and nos. Gatekeepers of sugar and television. People full of rules, many of them inexplicable. Why? a child asks Why? 

. Too-cold hands dress you, dextrous fingers deal with buttons. And parents are ahistorical; their past is irrelevant. But I want both you boys to know about the car that drove crooked, and the old men's thumping hearts, and about the other hidden moments in the biographical data.

A monster’s features are unlike anything seen before. Or, if they’re recognisable, they’re familiar only on a distorted, belief-defying way.

[Their] presence has started to feel like the beginning of an absence.

The dying man’s last breath, a deep one, I hear later, was inhaling his son and daughter.

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