Twelve Moons: The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you’ll read in 2023

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Navigating single parenthood, advocating from her girls and herself - an endless battle to be heard - is isolating and exhausting. Yet we see, she is gravity to the four girls in orbit around her, her own anxiety waxing and waning over the months, as the landscape around them and the turn of the seasons become her refuge.

Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (Audio Download Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (Audio Download

We’re very excited to welcome writer Caro Giles to celebrate the release of her debut book, Twelve Moons: A Year Under A Shared Sky. Award winning composer Peter Raeburn’s work has ranged from films such as Sexy Beast to adverts including Guinness Surfer. Peter’s forthcoming album Recovery is based on his personal experiences after having life-saving brain-surgery. The presentation of the book is absolutely stunning, both the cover artwork and title are beautiful. This memoir of Caro Giles is written in such a tone that you can't help but fall in love with her family, the moon and the landscapes of Northumberland. The author writes endearingly about the most heart-breaking times for her and her family.Addington and Ellis argue for a noble cause, but Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, does not allow them to be idols. They can be jealous, selfish and lustful, obsessing over intellectual arguments (the works of Walt Whitman and the ancient Greeks feature often) rather than considering how their choices will affect their loved ones. This complexity of character makes The New Life an adroit novel of ethics. “Her face injured him with its familiarity,” Crewe writes of Catherine, Addington’s wife. “‘I did not marry for this,’ she said.” We were almost invincible, our tribe, and I became used to deflecting questions about our family, and why we looked a little different…’ Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. She is at once alone and yet surrounded. Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her. The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you'll read in 2023, Twelve Moons follows a year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide Northumberland skies. Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. She is at once alone and yet surrounded.

Twelve Moons: A year under a shared sky eBook : Giles, Caro

When I stand and stare up at the moon, I can imagine kindred spirits doing the same, and I feel less alone.’ The cycle of the same routines we all go through, even when big things change, we still carry on doing the same daily things with the same people. Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones - and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides.This balance between motherhood and desiring individual freedom is something returned to throughout the text. The question of how can we do or be both is a powerful one. The answer is elusive, but part of it seems to be attached in the solace of the landscape, the wilderness of the Northumberland coast where the writer lives and, of course, the moon. The familiar certainty of its stages helped provide a certainty and reassurance in contrast to the unpredictability of life. It is, figuratively and literally, a light in the dark. Descriptions of the natural world permeate the novel, charting the ebbs and flows of the family’s life across a whole year. They are beautifully drawn and highlight the necessity of place in allowing fullness of life to take place whilst providing restoration for all the protagonists. It is here they can be truly themselves; the book felt just as much a love letter to the natural landscape as it did to her daughters. This is a beautifully written memoir, following a woman's timeline through the moon cycles as she come to terms with her family's changing dynamic, how the she copes with varying aspects of her children's needs, her own needs and re-discovering herself and her freedom. In these hours when the world is sleeping, I feel invincible. I am a mother of course, but I am also the promise of my own future, of who I can become. As I sit and watch the shadows cast from the candles, I see myself dancing, skirt spinning, hair caught in the wind, and I know that a better version of me is emerging .’ I don’t think I’ve ever met a creative woman who wasn’t into the moon. This book is, at its core — a love story between a woman; a creative; a mother — and the moon. It is also a telling of the way life can be shaped by circumstances outside of our control; impacted on by people, events and things we have no way of influencing. More so, though, it is a story of how one person — perhaps particularly a mother — holds, within their busy, tired hands – the power to change the world; to take a dark time and make it shine. I shared this book with a good friend, a mum like me whose everyday mothering strays from the conventional. There are plenty of us out there, raising anxious, poorly, neurodivergent children; dealing with schools, agencies and well meaning people who just don’t understand. I told her that reading memoirs like this make me feel less alone, in sisterhood with others who tread the wild pathways too.