As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories – and a terrifying brush with her own mortality – sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next?

In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who’ve faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she’s learned about coping with life’s unexpected blows.

Warm, candid and empathetic, this book is about what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don’t know we have.

Everybody should read this book or listen to then podcast - it will change your view of the world - Nigel

His style is writing is something that takes a while to get used to - and made me quite impatient at times - but Zusak makes contrasts between beauty and brutality, art and violence, and life and death right throughout the book. He offers an incredible portrait of family and loss, with three uniquely devastating romances woven into the plot of this vibrant adventure story.

So much happens in this book, it has many different elements. The writing style can be distracting but at its core, this is a novel about the strange and wonderful ways in which things that are broken are made whole again.
Kim R

The protagonist, Ruth Jefferson, has been a labor and delivery nurse for more than 20 years. She’s a widow — her husband was killed while serving in Afghanistan — and her son, Edison, is an honor student. She’s also an African American living in a very white area of Connecticut and is the only black staff member in the maternity ward of the hospital where she works. 

To survive in that white world, Ruth has convinced herself that race doesn’t matter. “I treat people the way I want to be treated,” she says, “based on their individual merits as human beings, not on their skin tone.” So when white supremacists Turk and Brittany Bauer refuse to allow Ruth to care for their newborn and the hospital acquiesces, she is shocked. JVW