This Wasn’t Meant to Happen is out NOW!

This week, something I’ve been carrying for years has finally found its place in the world. My novel, This Wasn’t Meant to Happen, is now published, in bookshops, on Amazon (although there is a temporary on there, saying it won’t be delivered until October, but please ignore this!), on kindle, and as an audio book. In short, it is finally ready to be picked up, shared, and hopefully held close.

It has been an extraordinary week of connection and community. From sitting down with Giovanna Fletcher on Happy Mum, Happy Baby, and sharing both mine and Poppy’s - and Sofie, Rory and Leo’s story with thousands of people for the very first time…and then - to the other extreme - a small, intimate roomful of people, at one of my first events, I’ve seen how powerful it can be when we begin conversations about grief, love, and what it really means to live through the hardest parts of life.

Storytelling - and especially novels - are such an incredible place for that. It allows us to walk in other people’s shoes while knowing we are safe and held through the experience. It’s a space where we can meet each other in honesty and vulnerability, and come away changed. That’s why I wanted this experience to have a place on the fiction shelves. Not just for the community who have no choice but to know the journey intimately and want their experience to be truly seen, rather than shrouded in silence, or diminished by statistics - but for any human who realises that grief is a path we will all walk one day. And that to know it before it happens, is to be given a profound gift of knowledge, insight and understanding that we’re often not given until the worst happens to us, personally. They say knowledge is power: well, what better way to learn how to survive the unimaginable, than being able to be guided gently through an experience of someone else’s - someone fictional journey that we have the privilege of being able to choose to take - rather than it being forced upon us.

When I think about what I want for This Wasn’t Meant to Happen, it’s this:

• That you share it with others who might need it - whether that’s a friend, a book group, or someone silently carrying something heavy.

• That it’s found in libraries, passed between hands, and becomes part of conversations about how we support each other through grief.

• That it offers comfort, perspective, strength and solidarity to anyone who recognises something of themselves in Sophie and Rory’s story.

• That it helps us remember grief is universal - but so is survival, so is connection, and so is love.

• That it shows how grief and hope can live alongside each other, just as beauty and pain do, and just as loss and love always will.

• That it opens up conversations about how storytelling - and especially fiction - can hold us safely while we walk in someone else’s shoes.

• That we begin to challenge the idea that certain stories are ‘too hard,’ ‘too niche,’ ‘too sad,’ or ‘too difficult to market’ - stories that so often centre on women’s experiences - and instead recognise how deeply necessary and valuable they are, whether in books, film, or television.

• That it reminds us the language of grief is one of the most powerful and unifying languages we have - inclusive, connective, and deeply human.

• That it invites us all to show up for one another, to not look away, and to find beauty in the moments of authentic connection grief can bring.

If I’ve learned anything from writing this book, and from living my own personal version of a love story of loss with Poppy that is seperate to Sofie and Rory’s, it’s that the language of grief might be the most powerful and beautiful language of all. It is all-inclusive (in both the best and worst possible ways, because we will all have to learn it one day). It can cross boundaries, unite us, and remind us that we are never truly alone.

But this isn’t just a story about loss. It’s a story about life, about love, and about how we cannot do any of this alone. When we leave people to grieve in silence, we lose the chance to witness the most authentic and powerful moments of human connection.

We are all here, in this life, together. My hope is that this book can be part of showing us how to reach out, to not look away, to be present for one another. We don’t need to wait for tragedy to offer that gift - we can live it now, together.

In the end, this book is not only Poppy’s gift to me - it is, I hope, her gift to the world. A reminder that we are never as alone as grief might make us feel, that survival is possible even in the darkest places, and that love always finds a way to thread itself through the cracks of loss.

If This Wasn’t Meant to Happen can bring us closer together - in conversation, in compassion, in the shared language of grief and hope - then it will have done what I always dreamed it might.

Because none of us can do this life alone. And we aren’t meant to.

Thank you for holding this story with me. Thank you for holding Poppy. And thank you for helping me share This Wasn’t Meant to Happen with the world.

With love, and with hope, always