Clare Mackintosh has long been a friend of Griffin Books. We’ve hosted numerous wonderful events with her over the years for her crime novels, so we’re delighted to welcome her back to Penarth to talk about her beautiful work of non-fiction, I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This.

Grief is universal, but it’s also as unique to each of us as the person we’ve lost. It can be overwhelming, exhausting, lonely and unreasonable. It is there when we least expect it and is seemingly never-ending. Wherever you are with your grief, and whoever you’re grieving for, I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This is here to support you. To tell you, until you believe it, that things will get easier.

After Clare’s little boy died in 2006, a stranger brought her a bunch of daffodils and promised it wouldn’t always hurt as it did then. Clare didn’t believe her, but as the years passed, those words began to take root. It didn’t get better, but it did get easier. Now Clare grows daffodils- a sign of hope after a long winter- as a way of remembering her son. Fourteen years after her son passed away, Clare tweeted about her experience of discovering grief no longer controlled her life, making some promises to others who might be going through the early days of their own grief, and it has the most incredible response all over the world. Yet what you can fit into a tweet is limited and Clare couldn’t reply to the thousands of people who reached out to her- and thus the idea for this book was born.

With 18 short assurances that are full of compassion- drawn from Clare’s experiences of losing her son and her father- this is the book she needed then.

Clare Mackintosh is a police offers turned crime writer and the multi-award-winning author of six Sunday Times bestselling novels, including I Let You Go, which was the fastest-selling debut thriller in the year it was released. Translated into forty languages, her books have sold more than two million copies worldwide, have been New York Times and international bestsellers and have spent a combined total of 64 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller chart. She now writers full time and lives in Wales with her husband and their three children.

Join us for what is guaranteed to be a very special event.