You will not sleep or eat or move until you’ve turned the last page. Utterly gripping

A comedy of modern wedding manners that's also gripping, sexy and sad

Gripping from beginning to end.

Fast-paced...strong characters and believable relationships. You'll not want to put it down!

Our favourite

Thoroughly involving

Dark, compelling and breathtaking, and I read it in a single sitting

A gripping undercurrent of forbidden love throughout: the book is scandalous and entertaining

I lost myself so completely in Fran and her family’s woes that I read the whole book in 24 hours rather than the 36 hours it took for everything to unfold. The wedding part was very realistic from the over amorous guests to the women changing into comfy shoes, but this was certainly the most intriguing wedding story I have ever read.
Fast paced and absorbing, I felt like I was one of the guests listening in to something I shouldn’t. A very juicy read!

READER RECOMMENDED: A cleverly written story, thought-provoking and easy to identify with.

Written in almost real time - no easy feat - Cohen combines deft plotting with smart pyschological insight. A writer clued up in the dark realms of grown-up relationships

At once entertaining yet deliciously edgy too. I read it in a sitting

I absolutely LOVED these essays. I knew I ought to ration myself to one a day in order to prolong the joy and fascination of them, but I just couldn't: I had to carry on reading and reading, like eating a whole packet of jelly babies in one sitting. What a fantastic, original, funny and touching voice! C J Hauser is a wondrous writer. This book will give so much happiness

Compassionate and funny and brave. The book is a masterclass in life writing, and a lesson in how to live a life outside the narratives that would contain us. CJ is a master story weaver. I was left wanting more, in the best way possible

In The Crane Wife, Hauser undertakes a new way for her to tell stories from her life, playing with history and personal history, exploring the possible hidden truths in her family's past and her own. The result is like interconnected short stories but about her life, the person she is and was, maybe even the person she never knew herself to be. Funny, exciting, vulnerable - truly visionary.

The Crane Wife more than delivers on the immense promise of the viral essay that served as its source. My goodness is it funny, but also so devastatingly honest and bracing. Reading it is like taking a long road trip with your wisest, sharpest friend and talking the entire way.

The Crane Wife is brilliant and beautiful - the vulnerability of her viral essay is expanded to include immense humour, pondering and further misadventures of the heart. An absolute must-read. I will be gifting this book all year long

In this perceptive and probing work, Hauser brilliantly parses the myths that shaped her understanding of love. . . Sparkling. . . A thrillingly original deconstruction of desire and its many configurations

Hauser is a delightful and agile writer, capable of speaking in multiple registers, but what all of her essays have in common is honesty, wisdom, a certain loopiness-she's an old soul with a fresh perspective and an energetic, wandering mind. The result is an imaginative and beautiful memoir, one that'll be passed through the secret sisterhood of crane wives for years.

Readers looking for something a little different in a memoir will not be disappointed. The strongest essays exemplify Hauser's keen awareness about life so far: things don't always work out as planned, love is complicated, and trusting your gut is, sometimes, the best option.

Perceptive and witty

Intimate, witty and beautifully crafted

"I am a kind of breakup pro," Hauser writes late in this lively, thoughtful, and often funny set of personal essays-at a point when the reader has learned much about how unlucky in love she's been. . . Hauser makes a welcome effort to talk about both love and culture in unconventional ways. . . A smart, inviting, and candid clutch of self-assessments

A staccato, funny, barbed, metaphor-laced, and thought-provoking memoir-in-essays. . . No matter her focus, Hauser's deductions about human nature are always arresting, delving, fresh, and exhilarating

While it's always difficult to summarize an essay collection, what holds The Crane Wife together is Hauser's unpacking of emotional truths: who do we love, and why, and what happens when they're gone? When we're alone? When we forget what it was like to love them?

This memoir may do for you what Blue has done for her Key, putting your unexpressed feelings into beautiful words and helping you feel connected to the world.

Key charts women's lives with a savage delicacy.

'A writer of a rare and strange magic.'

'I love Amy Key.'

'A beautiful read.'

'If you read one thing this weekend make it Amy Key's astonishing essay on Joni Mitchell's Blue, love and love's absence.'