I hope this soars, as it deserves to. Heartbreaking and heartmending, often within the same paragraph. I don't know how many times I cried, but enough to have lost count. Evocative, powerful, gorgeous novel.

I loved this beautifully tender heart breaking story of friendship and loss .It is perceptive and beautifully written I was in tiny bits by the end .
The book tells the story of best friends from childhood as they negotiate the early death of one friend in a hospice
Whilst this summary might suggest the book would be deeply traumatising and a hard read I never the less felt the love was so deeply ingrained in the story and it had a hopeful optimistic feel.
We all hope for a good death and in this story at least there was proof that this can indeed be possible.The young woman dies surrounded by those who love her in a palliative care hospice setting .
The novel focuses mainly on the experience of the surviving woman who struggles to come to terms with her friend’s loss .She deals with her trauma by sleeping with partners including at one stage the hospice doctor but ultimately the experience draws her nearer to her own family and estranged husband
The author has a clear easily read prose style the book was an enjoyable immersive read .Be warmed your will need a box of tissues handy
I read an early copy on NetGalley Uk the book is published in the Uk January 2023 by Random house Uk

A heartbreaking, emotional, uplifting read about a best friend who is dying and the emotional roller coaster that brings.

Edi and Ash are childhood friends who have shared many ups and downs. Edi is now in a hospice and in the final stages and this book takes us with Ash and her family as they all come to terms with the inevitable. Yes, it's obviously a difficult at times read, but, there's so much joy as well and it's a book for anyone who has lost a friend.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK Transworld Publishers for the opportunity to preview. Congratulations to Catherine Newman.

Thank you so much for sending me an arc of Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things, which I have now finished reading. I absolutely adored this book, which is fiction but feels incredibly real. (I guessed it was based on the author’s very personal experience of losing a loved one - every last detail was included.) What a beautiful, emotional novel this is, both heartbreaking and heartmending, with flawed, oh-so-human characters and events extolling the joy and pain of love, loss and life-long friendship.

Within the first paragraph, I knew I was going to love this book. What a beautiful story! It had me laughing and crying throughout. As a narrator, Ash is not the most instantly likeable of people. She's selfish, needy and I wasn't sure what to make of her at first. But as the story progresses you being to love her. She is taking care of her best friend since nursery school, Edi, who is dying of cancer in a hospice. It's set during the last couple of months of her friends life, but is peppered with stories from when they were growing up, travelling, having kids etc.

Food plays a vital role om the book and the descriptive manner in which it is laid out on the pages had me salivating. I'm so desperate for a lemon polenta cake!

Catherine has had first hand experience from
caring for a loved one in a hospice, that much is apparant in the Review 📚

2022 - Book 58

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Within the first paragraph, I knew I was going to love this book. What a beautiful story! It had me laughing and crying throughout. As a narrator, Ash is not the most instantly likeable of people. She's selfish, needy and I wasn't sure what to make of her at first. But as the story progresses you being to love her. She is taking care of her best friend since nursery school, Edi, who is dying in a hospice. It's set during the last couple of months of her friends life, but is peppered with stories from when they were growing up, travelling, having kids etc.

Food plays a vital role om the book and the descriptive manner in which it is laid out on the pages had me salivating. I'm so desperate for a lemon polenta cake!

Catherine has had first hand experience from caring for a loved one in a hospice, that much is apparant in the acknowledgements. To be able to use an awful personal tragedy to create something so hopeful, so beautiful, is no mean feat. Such a wonderful story, from beginning to end.

#bookreview #bookblogger #bookstagram #books #netgalley #penguin #penguinbooksacknowledgements. To be able to use an awful personal tragedy to create something so hopeful, so beautiful, is no mean feat. Such a beautiful story, from beginning to end.

#bookreview #bookblogger #bookstagram #books #netgalley #penguin #penguinbooks

This book is absolute sorcery. Not since some of Anne Tyler's early work have I felt like these people actually EXIST. Catherine Newman is a witch. I fell in love with her characters and mourned them when the book ended.

Edi is in her early forties, and dying. She has always asked a lot from her friends, but repaid them in kind with the type of scorching love that makes them want to be their best selves. Her best friend Ash takes her upstate to a hospice after she has to say goodbye to her young son, wanting to spare him the worst.

Edi and Ash - and Ash's extended family, including hot ex-husband Honey, sweet, queer school-skipping Belle and offensively normal Jules - bond together to try and make Edi's last days meaningful. Things are complicated - of course! - by Edi seeing Ash's torpedoing of her marriage as 'giving up' everything Edi wants to hold onto, but Ash is desperate not to feel anything and given to sessions of obliterating sex with randoms, including Edi's Tony Soprano lookalike doctor and her daughter's (female) former substitute teacher - to numb the pain. Some of the lines in this book were so relatable I felt like the author was reading my mind. I also want cake now.

“Is it better to have loved and lost?”

Ash & Edi captured my heart in this beautifully heart wrenching novel. While very brief it still packs a punch and discusses difficult topics like cancer. Love, & compassion.

This is not an easy book to read & follows Edi’s death with Ash visiting her in the hospice every day. This is a very thoughtful examination of the process of death and bereavement. If you want to read a book about 2 people who love each other & then one dies; this is the book for you.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy to read & review.

This is really intelligent but quirky read based around a woman supporting her long time best friend through her final days in a hospice, it’s generally very uplifting despite the heartbreak she’s suffering and brings to life the subject of living with death. There’s a raft of brilliant characters, great food and mixed emotions. I would have liked a bit more backstory to the friendship than it covers but otherwise it’s a positive read.

I admit, I was sceptical when I started reading this book. The story of your best friend dying in a hospice that's a funny read...? And when I began it, I worried that the constant quipping would feel like hard work. Like being sat next to the office joker who just can't stop seeing the funny side of things. All. The. Time.
But, as I continued reading (because it definitely keeps you turning those pages), I couldn't put it down. And the more I read, the more I came to understand and love the main character, Ash.
And there is an inherently surreal, almost hysterical side to watching someone you love fade away and slide into an in-between world between living and death and then their last moments as they leave you forever. At that point, the jokes do stop.
But overall, Newman's book shows how humour is the companion to pain, the flip side to the despair and confusion of grief - and that humour can also reveal poignant universal truths.. It doesn't shy away from the havoc that grief unleashes but it makes it clear that it's love that underpins the humour. A warm, brilliant book about friendship, grief and cake.
Another Netgalley reviewer mentioned the similar(ish) names. I noticed this too. There's Ash and there's a Dash. There's Jude, Jonah and Jules. That's quite a lot of Js (and I say this as a J, myself...). Still giving it 5 stars though.

What a beautiful, touching book. Edi and Ash are life-long best friends. Edi has terminal ovarian cancer and the time has come for her to move into hospice. She ends up moving into one close to her friend Ash, who visits every day and is there for her as she faces the end of her life, all while managing her own messy life. I loved these women and their friendship. I laughed and cried (sometimes on the same page). This novel is a very realistic portrayal of the feelings one has when they know a loved one has a limited time to live and is by their side as they decline. But it's not all doom and gloom and grief, it also spotlights the power and beauty of female friendship.

Thank you for the advanced copy, finished over a couple of nights this book stirred a lot of emotions inside me, I want to say immediately that I have not read a book like this before.
So well written that it's beautiful in its openess and honesty.

I work in Primary Care for the NHS and have always had a connection to anything around end of life.
This book at times is heart breaking, heart wrenching and then also mends your heart if that makes sense..
I am passionate about palliative care/end of life and that it should be discussed at the earliest opportunity to allow everyone involved time and space. The author, in this book encapsulated aspects of palliative care that others have struggled with.

This is a must read - highly recommended

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman has an endearingly irreverent narrator dealing with how messy life and grief and relationships can be. Manages to be both funny and sad and very real. My only slight issue was at the beginning I mixed up Jude and Jonah so more distinctive character names might have been better but maybe that was just me.

A book that breaks your heart, mends it, and then breaks it all over again, 'We All Want Impossible Things' is utterly gorgeous. There's honesty running through it - both in the way it deals with death, and how it deals with intricate, complicated relationships. So warm, and, surprisingly for a book about terminal illness, so life affirming. I'm not much of a hugger, but my god did I want to give almost every character a big hug. Newman captures something so weirdly specific and accurate about the palliative care environment - and enthuses everything with so much love and life that I found it impossible to put down, no matter how many tears I shed (which was quite a lot - whether from sadness or laughter, I'm still not entirely sure...!)
Having devoured this in an evening, I'm marking this as one of my must reads of 2023.