A Manual for Heartache

Cathy Rentzenbrink

28 December 2017
9781509824465
176 pages

Synopsis

'I devoured A Manual for Heartache in one sitting . . . a kind, honest and wise book about how to make a friend of sadness.' - Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

When Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. In A Manual for Heartache she describes how she learnt to live with grief and loss and find joy in the world again. She explores how to cope with life at its most difficult and overwhelming and how we can emerge from suffering forever changed, but filled with hope.

This is a moving, warm and uplifting book that offers solidarity and comfort to anyone going through a painful time, whatever it might be. It's a book that will help to soothe an aching heart and assure its readers that they're not alone.

A Manual for Heartache explores how to cope with life at its most difficult and overwhelming and provides reassurance that suffering may change us forever but we can emerge filled with hope.
I read A Manual for Heartache in a single sitting. Cathy’s not a therapist or a doctor and this book is all the better for it. It’s human and kind and rooted in the everyday, in the language that we all recognise and the horrors that we all experience when we feel out of control or so lost we can hardly speak. I loved it. I’ve learned from it. Every house needs one: like a torch and a spare fuse it can help you find your way home.
A Manual for Heartache is a book that could change the life of someone whose hands it finds its way into at the right moment. I wish I could go back and give it to my younger self at various points in my own life. A copy should be issued to every teenager in school . . . It delivers that most important of messages: You are not alone.