Hazel Hayes

A genre-bending story about love and loss, hope and heartbreak, and the healing to be found in life’s little limbos, those in-between spaces where you’re no longer who you were and not yet the person you will be About her debut, Out of Love, Hazel Hayes said, “The journey from writing horror to writing love stories was a short one. There is nothing more horrific than love.” In her new novel, she sets out to prove it. This genre-defying, meta-modern novel is unlike anything you have ever read, and yet at its core it is a story we all deeply understand. A story of love and liminality, and the ways in which grief grips us all. Prepare to laugh and cry; Hazel Hayes will break your heart, but then she’ll mend it for you. Following a breakup, Kate and Finn decide to keep sharing their house until the lease runs out in twelve weeks’ time, alternating week by week so that they are occupying the same space but never at the same time. Practically, the plan makes sense, but coming back each Sunday to a home where Finn has been and gone feels far too much like living with a ghost. Kate lost her mother at a young age and now this fresh grief dredges unhealed sorrows up to the surface, and soon, Kate finds herself adrift in her own subconscious, trapped in the liminal space between loving someone and letting go.

A Novel

Better By Far

Lindy

I hate these walls. These bare, eggshell walls. I hate the potential I saw in them.

If there's any hope at all of a day like that. I'll keep going.

After all that, after everything we've been through, we'll be a couple of strangers who used to know each other.

Standing on my doorstep, disguised as a monster, is love, begging to be let in.

And on days when I can hardly move under the weight of it, I remind myself that grief and love are intricately woven together, and healing isn't about shedding one or the other, it's about becoming strong enough to bear them both.

The longing in me to leave this world has been replaced by a fierce ache to live in it, to know it deeply and capture it the best I can.

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