I Promise It Won't Always Hurt Like This: 18 Assurances on Grief

Written by Clare Mackintosh

'Truly the best and most insightful book about grief I have ever read' Joanna Cannon

'Beautiful, heart-breaking and yet overwhelmingly hopeful' Mike Gayle

Grief is universal, but it's also as unique to each of us as the person we've lost. It can be overwhelming, exhausting, lonely, unreasonable, there when we least expect it and seemingly never-ending. Wherever you are with your grief and whoever you're grieving for, I Promise It Won't Always Hurt Like This is here to support you. To tell you, until you believe it, that things will get easier.

When bestselling writer Clare Mackintosh lost her five-week-old son, she searched for help in books. All of them wanted to tell her what she should be feeling and when she should be feeling it, but the truth - as she soon found out - is that there are no neat, labelled stages for grief, or crash grief-diets to relieve us of our pain. What we need when we're grieving is time and understanding. With 18 short assurances that are full of compassion - drawn from Clare's experiences of losing her son and her father - I Promise it Won't Always Hurt Like This is the book she needed then.

PRAISE FOR I PROMISE IT WON'T ALWAYS HURT LIKE THIS

'That Clare has used her own devastating experience to help others who are going through something similar is a brave and hugely laudable thing to do. A book that is both heart-breaking in its honesty and uplifting in its compassionate approach, it is beautifully written and offers - implicit in the title - hope' Alan Titchmarsh

'Wherever you are with your grief, and whoever you're grieving for, this incredibly honest book was written to support you... full of compassion and comfort' Adele Parks, Platinum

'A book dripping with a compassion that can only truly be laid out on the page by a Survivor of the Trenches of Grief . We need now, perhaps more than ever, beacon-makers like Clare to help guide us through our darkness' Greg Wise

'A true lifeline if you think no one else can possibly understand how you feel' Jill Mansell

'Written with honesty, realism, deep personal insight and hope' Child Bereavement UK

'A salve for broken hearts. Readers who've been touched by loss will find comfort in these pages.' Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little, Brown (Hachette UK) Audio
• Release date: Mar 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781405552189

Clare Mackintosh

With over 2 million copies of her books sold worldwide, number one bestseller Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of I Let You Go, which was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016. Both Clare's second and third novels, I See You and Let Me Lie, were number one Sunday Times bestsellers. Her first three thrillers were selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and together have been translated into forty languages. After the End was published in 2019 and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller, and in 2021 Hostage flew straight into the top ten. Her new crime series, featuring Welsh detective DC Ffion Morgan, has been critically acclaimed, with both The Last Party and A Game of Lies hitting the Sunday Times top ten. Together, her books have spent more than sixty-five weeks in The Sunday Times bestseller lists. Clare is patron of the Silver Star Society, a charity based at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, which supports parents experiencing high-risk or difficult pregnancies. She lives in North Wales with her husband and their three children.