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

Product Information

TWELVE MOONS follows a year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide Northumberland skies. A memoir told over 12 moons. A newly single mom and her 4 daughters (including one with specific needs) navigate their small town lifestyle with lots of nature hikes, singing, occasional quarantines, and ocean swimming. Sometimes the use of candles and their mystical power is a bit too much, but this mother's fortitude is incredible. 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. To hold our children close, as the worlds both outside and inside feel increasingly threatening; confusing; overwhelming? We hope you will join us, and Caro, Thur sday 19 th January here at FORUM Books, The Chapel, Corbridge.

Twelve Moons: Finding strength on the edge of nowhere

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. Set over the course of a year and charting her life as a single parent raising her four daughters, Twelve Moons is a stunning debut novel. 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. We were almost invincible, our tribe, and I became used to deflecting questions about our family, and why we looked a little different…’

Meet Nikki

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) 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. Clay by Melissa Harrison is published today by Bloomsbury. "Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone" says Robert Macfarlane.... 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. This is a debut memoir that will particularly resonate with anyone who has had their life smashed apart and needed to dig deep, just to keep going. In Caro Giles’s case that’s the reality of divorce and the everyday needs of her tribe of four daughters. Given that she is writing so close to the traumas and challenges, there is a rawness in Twelve Moons that makes for challenging reading at times. But you will soon see that love and tenderness permeate every aspect of the lives we read about. Written with intelligence - a blend of lightness, elegance, and even the elegiac, Twelve Moons immerses you in the Northumbrian landscape, with excursions to other quiet places. This is not the life Caro Giles envisaged - an important thread of the read is to see how she adapts to dramatically changed circumstances simply to make things work… to get through the days.

Twelve Moons by Caro Giles | Waterstones

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. All of this covers the time of global crisis during the pandemic. She evokes the lives of her 4 amazing daughters, The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One with honesty, compassion and clarity. In fact, the calm and chaos of their lives mirror the ebb and flow of the tides and the lunar cycle beautifully. The nature descriptions of landscape, sea and sky are breathtakingly realistic. 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.I loved that the Full Moon each month was a focal point. How important it was to find that familiar glow, sometimes in amongst deep cloud, sometimes a bright summer night sky...it was a constant in an ever changing and evolving world. 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.

Twelve Moons: A year under a shared sky – HarperCollins Twelve Moons: A year under a shared sky – HarperCollins

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. Adam Henson is a farmer and presenter. He runs Cotswold Farm Park in Gloucestershire, which pioneers rare breed conservation and was opened by his father Joe in 1971. Television credits include Countryfile, Lambing Live, Coast and Inside Out. His latest book ‘Two For Joy’ looks at countryside superstitions and folklore.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 .’ When I stand and stare up at the moon, I can imagine kindred spirits doing the same, and I feel less alone.’ Thankfully, her important words did become a book, and what a book it is. I am certain I am not alone when I say this book has reshaped how I view many things: neurodivergence; caring; mothering; the need for alone time as a woman — and much more besides. I hope Giles realises that in writing her own story with such honesty and precision, she has made many of us feel less alone, too; more connected to others spending their busy days and long nights as we are. 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. Here's a coincidence: On the day that a copy of the new Robert Macfarlane book arrived at the office, I...