A Manual for Heartache: How to Feel Better

A Manual for Heartache: How to Feel Better

When Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. Here she describes how she learned 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. "I devoured A Manual for Heartache in one sitting . . . a kind, honest and wise book about how to make a friend of sadness." —Rachel Joyce, author, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry  "A book that could change the life of someone whose hands it finds its way into at the right moment. I wish I could go back and give it to my younger self at various points in my own life. A copy should be issued to every teenager in school . . . It delivers that most important of messages: You are not alone." —Alice Adams, author, Invincible Summer "In clear and warm fashion, Rentzenbrink has written a lovely, simple book about how to cope with life’s bumps and shocks and sadnesses. There is a lot of intelligence here—it brims with it—but it is presented in such an informal way that it always has the feel of someone sitting by your bedside, rather than standing behind a lectern. . . . One of her tips, as an avid book lover, is to read “gentle, comforting, funny things” and that is what she herself is offering here. Not just a comfort in the advice she offers, but in the reassuring way she is choosing to offer it." — Guardian “Brilliant, lump-in-the-throat writing from a warm heart: to be kept next to the bed for when you can’t sleep.” -- The Guardian--US Online   Cathy Rentzenbrink is a journalist and the author of the memoir The Last Act of Love , which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.