Finally, my ship…

Posted byLouise BeechPosted inUncategorized

Like main character Grandad Colin in 1943, How to be Brave is crossing the ocean today. I hope it fairs a bit better on its journey than he did. Right now, seventy-three years ago, he was about halfway through his lifeboat ordeal, with another month until rescue. Daffodils and lighter evenings were brightening home while he and his sea brothers drifted in unbearable heat. The book he inspired has a much shorter and easier trip to reach foreign shores.

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On this wonderful spring day How to be Brave is officially released in America and Canada. I feel very distant from it in some ways but extremely close in others. Even though nothing will physically happen to me today, I feel like I’m standing on a pier waving off my baby, my debut, my book.

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I love the US and have visited there numerous times over the years, most recently to New York last year. Apparently if you make it there you can make it anywhere. Does this go for books? We will see. I took my original very first copy of the novel there with me so she has had a little taster of far flung places already. Canada holds a special place in my heart too, even though I’ve not yet visited. My cousins are Canadian and my lovely publisher – Karen Sullivan who made my dream come true – hails from there also.

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At the top of the world with daughter Katy (New York)

So How to be Brave is being shipped now farther afield, across water. Back when I was receiving rejection after rejection for the book my husband said quite profoundly to me, “That rejection wasn’t your ship. Your ship is still coming. I know it.” And just as it did for Colin after a long time on the ocean, it did for me after a long time on a sea of words, thanks to Orenda Books.

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My very first copy of How to be Brave against the morning skyline

Now my book belongs to the world. Bon Voyage!

Buy How to be Brave here (USA)

Buy How to be Brave here (Canada)

Published by Louise Beech

I remember sitting in my musician father's cross-legged lap while he tried to show me the guitar chords. I was three. His music sheets fascinated me - strange language that translated into music. My mother taught French and English, so her fluency with words fired my interest. I love all forms of writing. My short stories have won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting twice for the Bridport Prize and being published in a variety of UK magazines. My first play, Afloat, was performed at Hull Truck Theatre in 2012. I also wrote a ten-year newspaper column for the Hull Daily Mail about being a parent. My debut novel, How to be Brave, was a Guardian Readers' pick for 2015. My third novel Maria in the Moon was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and longlisted for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl longlisted for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was Best magazine’s Best Book of the Year 2019; and I Am Dust was a Crime Magazine Monthly Pick. This Is How We Are Human was a Clare Mackintosh Book of the Month. Daffodils, the audiobook of my memoir, and Nothing Else were released 2022. End of Story (as Louise Swanson) and the paperback version of my memoir, Eighteen Seconds, were released in 2023.

10 thoughts on “Finally, my ship…”

  4. I am certain it will do well, it can’t not! It is such a brilliant book. I am telling my brother and his family (in Canada) to tell their friends. I loved this book.

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  6. Congrats, Louise. I will be going to American in a couple of weeks so I’ll keep an eye out for your book. And if the bookstores don’t have it on the shelves I shall certainly scold them and suggest they carry it!

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  7. Thanks Joe! It may only be online rather than in stores, not entirely sure! But be sure to order it in every store she they have it in, even if you then don’t pick it up! Did you enjoy the book? xx

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