A Day Like This

What if everything you've ever loved, ever known, ever believed to be true...just disappeared? Annie Beyers has everything--a beautiful house, a loving husband, and an adorable daughter. It's a day like any other when she takes Hannah to the pediatrician...until she wakes hours later from a car accident. When she asks for her daughter, confused doctors tell Annie that Hannah never existed. In fact, nothing after waking from the crash is the same as Annie remembers. Five happy years of her life apparently never happened. Annie's marriage is coming to an end. Now a successful artist living in Manhattan, she's no longer home in their beloved upstate farmhouse. Her long-estranged sister is more like a best friend, and her recently deceased dog is alive and well. With each passing day, Annie's remembered past and unfamiliar present begin to blur. Haunted by visions of Hannah, and with knowledge of things she can't explain, Annie wonders...is everyone lying to her? The search for answers leads Annie down an illuminating path far from home, to reconcile the memories with reality and to discover the truth about the life she's living.

You can't change your past. You can only use the experiences you live through to make your future better, wiser. Anna and her best friend George meet every week to remember, to sigh, to laugh, to reminisce about their moments of glory, guilt and mischief and share their sorrows over a glass or three of wine. The things they've done still make them blush. Anna wanted to be a poet – a famous poet. George left home in a childish rage and years later returned with her baby. When Anna is asked to look after the boy across the road for a few hours each week, she isn't sure. She doesn't really do children. But she takes the job on and, gradually, a child's view of her world shows her a different place. George remembers a flat she stayed in when she ran away from home. It had the kitchen of all kitchens and, oh, how she'd love to see it again. Anna sets out to see if it still exists and discovers a cookbook full of recipes, intimates notes and drawings from George's life. Does all this mark an ending or the beginning of something new and marvellous for Anna and George?

The book serves as an inspiration to those who suffered at the hands of another and shows what can happen when you get up, dust yourself off, and keep on going. The book shows what can happen if you don’t get up and keep going. So when there are bullies on the playground, tell someone.

‘The bombshell book everyone is talking about’ DAILY MAIL ‘A radio genius ... the maestro of the show’ EVENING STANDARD

A new novel of artful understatement about mortality, estrangement, and the absurdity of life from the acclaimed author of Unformed Landscape and In Strange Gardens On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctor’s visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, a great yearning takes hold of him—but who can tell if it is homesickness or wanderlust? Andreas leaves everything behind, sells his Paris apartment; cuts off all social ties; quits his teaching job; and waves goodbye to his days spent idly sitting in cafes—to look for a woman he once loved, half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days has been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a new beginning. Andreas’ travels lead him back to the province of his youth, back to his hometown in Switzerland where he returns to familiar streets, where his brother still lives in their childhood home, and where Fabienne, a woman he was obsessed with in his youth, visits the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas, still consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of his future, is tormented by the question of what might have been if things had happened differently. Peter Stamm has been praised as a “stylistic ascetic” and his prose as “distinguished by lapidary expression, telegraphic terseness, and finely tuned sensitivity” (Bookforum). In On a Day Like This, Stamm’s unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with our antihero through his crises of banality, of living in his empty world, and the realization that life is finite—that one must live it, as long as that is possible. Praise for Unformed Landscape: “Sensitive and unnerving. . . . An uncommonly intimate work, one that will remind the reader of his or her own lived experience with a greater intensity than many of the books that are published right here at home.” —The New Republic Online “If Albert Camus had lived in an age when people in remote Norwegian fishing villages had e-mail, he might have written a novel like this.”—The New Yorker “Unformed Landscape has a refreshing purity, a lack of delusion, a lack of hype.”—Los Angeles Times

Prophetic fiction that is a warning of storms to come.

NOW A NETFLIX SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • TWO PEOPLE. ONE DAY. TWENTY YEARS. • What starts as a fleeting connection between two strangers soon becomes a deep bond that spans decades. • "[An] instant classic. . . . One of the most ...emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter." —People It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. They face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Dex and Em must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself. As the years go by, the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed. "[A] surprisingly deep romance...so thoroughly satisfying." —Entertainment Weekly