Bedtime Story

From the best-selling author of The Tall Man and The Arsonist, a personal tale about death, life and the enchantment of stories. With illustrations by Anna Walker.

Let me tell you a story…

When Chloe Hooper’s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons.

By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children’s literature—with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals—can teach about grief and resilience in real life.

As she discovers, ‘the right words are an incantation, a spell of hope for the future.’ From the Brothers Grimm to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Tolkien and Dahl—all of whom suffered childhood bereavements—she follows the breadcrumbs of the world’s favourite authors, searching for the deep wisdom in their books and lives.

Both memoir and manual, Bedtime Story is stunningly illustrated by the New York Times award-winning Anna Walker. In an age of worldwide uncertainty, here is a profound and moving exploration of the dark and light of storytelling.

‘This book is a miracle of light and meaning-making from one of our finest writers. Venturing inward with extraordinary grace, Hooper explores – and extends – the long literary line surging with our deepest inherited wisdom about how to embrace our finite lives. The result is nothing less than the hero's journey we have been collectively starving for. Telling you this is like trying to describe the sun; it is a book so powerful and beautiful – so utterly its own – that it can only be experienced directly.’
Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer

‘Exquisitely beautiful. This book is an act of love.’
Anna Funder, author of All That I Am and Stasiland

‘An important book about the ways fiction can provide escape and hope and meaning in the face of unbearable pain. The ways it can teach and guide and contain, illuminating the darkness. A book about the marvel and wonder of children, and our terror for them, when things change in ways we can neither predict nor control. A book about love and story, and why one is essential to the other. Deeply moving, compelling and thought-provoking, Bedtime Story explores the reasons why we write for children, the mystery we are trying to get to the heart of, the tools we are trying to give to our young people to survive. A book about the ways we can triumph over loss and grief, with the stories that we write, the worlds we draw. Deeply engrossing and honest, human, full of love and tenderness, with moments of sparkling humour in the struggle. I loved everything about Bedtime Story. I loved particularly what it taught me about authors who write for children, the ways that writing and reading provides compensation, balancing the scales between loss and love.’
Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye of the Sheep and Too Loud Lily

‘Everything you’d ever want in a bedtime story – heroes and heroines, puzzles and dangers, invisible forces, birds, trees, beasts, poetry, sadness and joy. Stories within stories. I was spellbound from the start. As for the ending…. I can’t tell you that.’
Paul Kelly, author of How To Make Gravy