Twelve Months and a Day

People die. Love doesn’t.‘A bitter-sweet pang in my heart’ Monique Roffey

‘A beautiful book. Insanely romantic and utterly convincing’ Julie Myerson

‘A wonderful and inventive novel, sorrowful and hopeful in equal measure. It was a true pleasure to read’ Miranda Cowley Heller

‘Louisa Young is the great chronicler of romantic love and the pain of its loss’ Linda Grant

‘Heart-stoppingly romantic… A lovely, moving, ultimately hopeful read’ Mirror

‘What a writer… so beautifully earthed in the everyday. Terrific’ Elizabeth Buchan

‘A modern day Truly Madly Deeply… Rasmus and Roisin both lose their partners, but the ghosts of Nico and Jay stay, unable to leave their loved ones alone as the broken-hearted pair find comfort in each other. Beautifully written, this is a haunting love story – literally’ Best magazine, Must-Reads

‘A skilfully calibrated love-after-death tale, it’s a four course feast of hearts broken, hearts mended, of songs, laughter, old regrets and fresh desire, that demands a major film deal’ Patrick Gale

‘A wonderful novel, charming and surprising, filled with loss and its triumphant opposites’ Susie Boyt

‘Thoughtful, philosophical and clever, it is also funny, and full of poetry, and powered by an unflagging and irresistible belief in the redemptive power of love’ Perspectives magazine

Rasmus and Jay, Róisín and Nico – two beautiful, ordinary love stories, cut short by death. Jay and Nico don’t even believe in ghosts, yet they seem to be… still here. Still in love with Rasmus and Roísín. And maddeningly powerless.

Both are incapable of leaving the living alone: Jay plays matchmaker, convinced that Rasmus and Róisín can heal each other; Nico, plagued by jealousy, doesn’t agree.

Rasmus and Róisín are just trying to navigate their newly widowed lives.

But all four of them are thinking the same thing: what is love, after death? What is it for? And what are we to do with it?