This Time Next Year

by Sophie Cousens

‘If you want to grow it, it takes time, you have to persevere.’ Connie gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Your generation never stick anything out.’ ‘Mum, I don’t think me getting a haircut is symptomatic of my being in the snowflake generation.’

‘All you can hope for is to do more good than harm in this life, that’s my motto.

Greg was a jigsaw piece she’d been trying to make fit and the effort of forcing it felt like wearing a corset, pressuring her to conform to its shape.

‘Be a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely.’ It was one of Leila’s highest aspirations: self-sufficiency.

‘I don’t think the scale of other people’s problems make your own any easier to live with.’

agoraphobic

‘If you kiss a man and he runs a mile, he’s no good. Life is full of times you have to turn towards the storm, and life brings many storms. Sick children, parents dying, cancer, just the challenge of building a life together and not driving each other completely nuts. You need a man who’ll turn into the storm with you when it comes,

This last month she’d felt more ‘me’ than she’d felt in her whole life: more contained, more comfortable in her own skin.

a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely’ – that had to be the aspiration. She wanted to fuel her own fire. If you got your fuel from men,

P.S. This book was written in a pre-COVID world. The 2020 of Minnie and Quinn’s world now only exists in some parallel universe. Whatever the year ahead might bring for us all, let’s keep reading. Books free us from isolation. Stories unite us. We’ve all had to play in One Player mode for a while – but we’re all still in this game together.