How To Make Life Nice

How To Make Life Nice is a novel, sparkling with gems of self-help wisdom.

Journalist and academic Charlie Lee-Potter has called it: "A compelling examination of love, loss and family ties... beautiful, assured, lyrical... complex, ambitious and clever."

Category: Fiction, literary, contemporary, humour, psychological, mystery with parts historical and parts hysterical.

A coming of middle-age tragicomedy in which our empty-nesting, partnerless, parentless, jobless but resolutely cheerful heroine has to confront the awful truth that life isn't always nice and being nice doesn't always work.

The family home has to be sold - a flat full of boxes, a garden choked with ivy. Contrary to her brother Will's advice, Georgina proposes to sort it all out by herself. She has underestimated the power of the past. Buried alone with 200 years' worth of accumulated stuff - letters, photographs, odds, sods and bits and bobs - she begins to lose touch with the present and her own world begins to unravel.

Set in contemporary Bristol, and Stratford-upon-Avon during the summer of '76.