Readings Sam Read Booksellers: Caro Giles and Polly Atkin online

The Lake District’s famous Sam Read Bookseller has teamed up with HarperNorth to present an author talk and Q&A as Caro Giles chats about her memoir, Twelve Moons, with Grasmere-based poet and writer Polly Atkin.

Twelve Moons is about mothering in the middle of nowhere, and was published by Manchester-based HarperNorth in January. It follows a year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide skies of Northumberland, where Caro Giles lives with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One.

Here’s some book blurb: She is at once alone and yet surrounded. Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her. Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones – and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides. Twelve Moons follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives. A dazzlingly honest memoir that while never turning away from the awkward truths of life, also shows how love will flourish if we can only find a space for ourselves. Set against windswept beaches and ancient hills, this is a story steeped in nature and landscape. Since our earliest days, mankind has looked up at the moon and seen a story reflected back. Twelve Moons is one of those stories – a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone.

This is Caro Giles’ first book. She has a masters, with distinction, in Travel and Nature Writing from Bath Spa University and in 2021 she won the inaugural BBC Countryfile New Nature Writer of the Year competition. She also writes a monthly column for Psychologies magazine. She writes honestly about what it means to be a woman, a mother and a carer, and about the value in taking the road less travelled.

Polly Atkin (FRSL)’s poetry collections are Basic Nest Architecture (Seren, 2017) and Much With Body (Seren, 2021), and she has written the biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021) and a memoir, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023).

The event will take place virtually over at Zoom at 19:30 UK time on Tuesday 21 November. You will be sent a Zoom link once you’ve bought a ticket for the event.