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Tackling the issue of long-term mental illness with wit and candour, Mason’s remarkable novel takes a rounded, empathetic look at the condition through the experiences of a middle-aged woman who has struggled to find contentment in her adult life.
Shortlisted for The British Book Awards 2022 Fiction Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.
So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?
Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.
Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix - or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
ISBN: 9781474622974
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 573 g
Dimensions: 238 x 160 x 38 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Sorrow and Bliss is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I'm always hoping to be to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know.' - Ann Patchett
'A sharply observed, darkly hilarious and merciless portrait of a thoroughly messed-up family. Patrick Melrose meets Fleabag. Brilliant.' - Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
'Meg Mason writes about the slow bleed of life-long depression with candour, humour and stark precision. Sorrow and Bliss is about what happens when your illness pushes everyone away - leaving you with only the sorest parts of yourself for company. It will, as the title suggests, shatter your heart, before mending it with infinite love. I've never read anything like it and will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know.' - Pandora Sykes
'Nina Stibbe meets Fleabag - Charlotte Heathcote.' - Daily Express
'An incredibly funny and devastating debut... enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change.' - The Guardian
'Brutal, tender, funny, this novel - a portrait of love in all of its many incarnations - came alive for me from the very first page. I saw myself here. I saw the people I love. I am changed by this book.' - Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
'Nina Stibbe meets Fleabag.' - Daily Express
'Sorrow and Bliss is hilarious, haunting, and utterly captivating. Meg Mason has created a heroine as prickly as Bernadette in Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Her humor is as arch and wise as the best work of Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk, yet completely original. What a thrilling new voice!' - Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters
'This is a romance, true, but a real one. It's modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason's writing is less self-conscious than Rooney's, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant-the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag.' - Bookseller+Publisher
'So dark, so funny, so true. You will see your sad, struggling, triumphant self in this deeply affecting novel.' - Laura Zigman, author of Seperation Anxiety
'With its finger on the modern pulse, Sorrow and Bliss blisters with its prose which manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking in the same line. I kept having to stop to underline sentences. It reminded me of a cross between Fleabag and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but really, Meg Mason has crafted a protagonist who feels completely her own person. Fresh and alive.' -
Jodie Chapman, author of Another Life
'Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt. Much like the narrator of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Martha's voice is acerbic, witty, and raw. Fans of Marian Keyes should put this on their to-read lists.' - Booklist
'Martha's anecdotes, simultaneously funny and sad, are stacked with observations that alternate between brutally cutting-especially when directed at her mother and at the patient and supportive Patrick-and aching, as when her oblique descriptions of her sister's growing family increasingly belie her true feelings about motherhood. Witty and stark, Martha's emotionally affecting story will delight fans of Sally Rooney.' - Publishers Weekly
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