Sorry I couldn’t finish this book. It was too close to home and family circumstances. I am sure it was well written but just too heart rending for me

"We All Want Impossible Things" by Catherine Newman is a funny and poignant novel about a lifelong best-friendship that is disrupted by a cancer diagnosis. Edi and Ash grew up together, and when Edi enters the last stage of life following three years of failed treatments for ovarian cancer, she transfers to a hospice close to Ash's home, leaving behind her son and husband.

Newman approaches this novel with a raw honesty that includes leaking feed tubes, pain, confusion and grief. However, she also tempers the tragedy with a huge amount of humour. As a result, this novel does that rare thing of making you laugh out loud and cry so much your daughter tries to ban you from reading it.

A recent New Yorker book review described the book as fitting into a genre called “really too sad for my taste, but so good I couldn’t put it down, and now I have to tell everyone I know they have to read it.” I really couldn't have put it any better!

We All Want Impossible Things
by Catherine Newman

This is one of the funniest and most uplifting books I have read all year. It is hard to believe, even while reading it, but this is a book about death. It is about two life long best friends, Ash and Edi. 45 year old Edi is coming to the end of her journey with ovarian cancer and Ash has thrown herself into being there for her friend's last few weeks in hospice.

The relationship between Ash and Edi is just gorgeous. Through dribbling and spilling and wiping and mopping and pain and exhaustion, their ease with each other, their verbal shorthand, their sparkling repartee never lets up. Their devotion to each other is a joy to behold.

I love every one of the characters that appear throughout these pages. They all hold each other up just the right amount, at just the right time, in the just right way. I love the hospice setting and the overspill of kindness and attention that is so authentic to such places.

I love Edi and admire a person who can attract such fierce love and care, and I love Ash for being the best possible friend anyone could wish for, despite her constant worry that she is never doing enough.

I got a little lost with the J characters at first:

Jude = Edi's husband
Jules = Ash's daughter
Jonah = Edi's brother (and Ash's "buddy")

Don't let the tough matter of dying stop you from reading this incredible story. It is a rollercoaster of emotions and grief and worry and hilarity, but ultimately it is about friendship and family and love.

Publication Date: 12th January 2023
Thank you #netgalley and #randomhouseuk for the egalley

I had very mixed feelings about this book. Edi and Ash are childhood friends but Edi now has terminal cancer and is being cared for in a hospice. A book about long-lasting friendship, love, family and of course loss. However I could not bring myself to like the character of Ash with her broken marriage and many lovers and Edi seemed to fade into the background amongst all this drama. The story of their friendship from childhood was very fragmented and there were many characters with very similar names which sometimes made the story difficult to follow. I also couldn’t get to grips with the concept that Edi had been moved so far away from her husband and 7 year old son and that all concerned seemed to be accepting of this. There were however many moments of humour and poignancy that redeemed this book and life in the hospice was in my experience quite accurately depicted. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this novel in return for an honest review.

This book made me laugh, cry and everything in-between. The story of Ash and Edi, best friends since childhood, who's lives are entwined in all the best ways. Edi has only weeks to live and Ash chronicles the last week's they spend together in a hospice. It is full of warmth and honesty; never shying away from the realities of a life coming to it's end but never forgetting about the joy of living.

I have seen this book everywhere! There is a big buzz about this book and I think it is going to be very popular..

This is the story of a friendship between two women, a friendship which has survived many things but now one of the friends is dying of cancer…

At the centre of the story is this friendship and I think a big story to be told but unfortunately for me there were too many other things going on which distracted and detracted from the central story. There were a lot of characters with very unusual names and I struggled to work out their part in the story…I felt completely unbalanced by so many things going on and so many characters and as fast as I tried to right myself I lost my balance again…
The other issue for me personally was the level of detail in the story. Having experienced cancer in a loved one and found very little literature covering the experience at the time, I really applaud literature which represents the experience more fully. However, I hadn’t anticipated finding some tiny details which were so specific and so triggering and really upset me. I have read many cancer accounts more recently and been ok but I think the degree of specificity in this book was just too much for me. I think readers need to be ready for details such as food in pegs…

I have no doubt that readers will enjoy this book and enjoy the story of this special friendship and I am very grateful to Netgalley and for my digital copy.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and Catherine Newman for an advance copy of this e-book.
Would it be wrong to say I thoroughly enjoyed this story about end-of-life care and dying......I hope not because I really did. Catherine Newman has written a beautiful and very poignant story about long term friends Edi and Ash. Edi is now in a hospice with end stage ovarian cancer and childhood friend Ash spends time with her reminiscing their lives, loves, highs and lows. Yes, at times it is very sad, but it's also interspersed with humour (sometimes very dark humour- the type to make you laugh out loud even when you know you shouldn't) and the characters are so well written and likeable that it makes for a wonderful read.

Catherine Newman writes beautifully and authentically of a lifelong love between the flawed 45 year old Ash Feld and her friend Edi, who is married to Jude, living in New York, and with a 7 year old son, Dash. Edi has ovarian cancer and is now approaching the end of her life, there are no local hospice places, and she makes the heartbreaking choice to move to the Graceful Shepherd Hospice, aka Shakely, in Massachusetts, close to Ash, because Dash cannot cope with the realities of his mother dying. No-one knows Ash better than Edi, from childhood they have been there for each other through every significant life event, their relationship underpinned by blind faith and absolute dependability, Edi's memories are akin to a back up hard drive for Ash. Ash is in the midst of her own midlife crisis, divorcing her husband, Honey, although you would never know as he is always there, for Ash, for Edie, and their daughters, Belle and Jules.

As Ash sleeps with many, she shapes her life around the last days of Edie, finding herself stumbling through the process of grief, the inevitable loss, creating final lasting memories and of being there for Edie, bearing witness to the bodily indignities as the end comes ever closer, the inescapable pain, fear and tsunami of tears and fears, feeling desperately ill prepared. But it is of course complicated, an emotional time of Ash forging closer connections with her family and friends, as they form a unbreakable circle of love and light around Edie. The spirit of life overflows with its beauty, irreverence, joy, humour, wit, a bountiful array of food, drink and parties. There is the hunt for Edie's all time favourite Sicilian lemon polenta pound cake, the magic of music, questions of life and death, painting nails, the wonders of Farrah Fawcett and Pinky Pie, and stepping into an emotional quagmire as Ash tries to work out what to hold onto and when to let go.

Newman comes from a real place and her own personal experiences of love, heartbreak, grief, and impending loss in this exquisite and astute examination of that territory between life and death, the humanity, the imperfections, the messiness and the chaos, wanting impossible things, whilst the world as you know it is shattering into a million tiny pieces, a world that is slowly being rearranged as perspectives shift and change. This is a touching, moving, loving, and inspiring read which I adored, insightfully portraying the incredible staff that provide palliative care and the hospice experience. A remarkable and unforgettable book sprinkled with stardust that I recommend to everyone. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Edi and Ash have been through so many things in their 40-year friendship. Now Edi is dying in a hospice and Ash is, as always, by her side. The two relive their time together, but Ash also has to face up to the fact that her present life is a bit of a mess. And soon, she’ll need to face it alone. While there are sad moments in this book, they’re accompanied by humour and compassion.

A lovely story about friendship, relationships, family and also grief. The grief is kind of central as Edi is in a hospice with the final stages of terminal cancer and her best friend Ash is by her side through those final days. However, it is a hopeful story, about memories and joy and just how messy and complex lives can be. I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend.
With thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I didn't initially know too much about what this book was about but was drawn in by the incredible reader reviews and author endorsements. I'm so glad I picked it up - it's one of the most moving and funny books I've read in a long time. The friendship between Edi and Ash is so honestly and lovingly drawn, and the realities of hospice care and terminal illness are unflinchingly but sensitively portrayed. For so many reasons I never wanted this book to end - and I cried my eyes out when it did . Truly, madly, beautiful.

A fantastic bok that was both utterly compelling but also completely heartwrenching. It was agripping read with well developed characters and a good level of humour to level out the sad moments. I loved it.

this was a brilliant read, but such a difficult one, being a story of two friends, ash and edi, dealing with the saddest, most heartbreaking situation anyone could think of - one of them is in a terminal care hospice, losing her fight with cancer. having grown up together and now being in their 40s, there’s a lot of love and history and realness in their relationship. the story is told through ash who takes care of edi and simultaneously tries to grapple with the (imminent) loss through vignettes of hospice daily life with a side of her romantic entanglements (and her being recently divorced there’s quite a few of those). however, those never take over the narrative but show ash off in such a humane, messy, beautiful light. i would recommend this one especially to fans of sorrow and bliss

"We all want Impossible Things" is set around the character Edith, who is dying in a hospice somewhere in Massachusetts. Don't let this put you off though, as the story is really about how others, particularly her best friend, cope with the situation. Ashley appears rather flaky but she really loves Edi and devotes a lot of her time to her care in her final weeks. In fact most of the characters, and their inter-relationships are fairly complex. The staff at the hospice are, as you would hope, wonderful and supportive. Once I got past the incomprehensible Americanisms (luckily not to many) I found the book moving and amusing rather than depressing. After all, we all have to die sometime, it's just unfortunate that in some cases it seems too soon.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publishers for the opportunity to review this book.

This book was everything. I inhaled it over a weekend. Funny, poignant and compelling, it reminded me to embrace and value those I love, while making me laugh and cry simultaneously. Simply, brilliant. Having written all this I still don't think I've fully expressed how much I LOVE THIS BOOK. I wish I could erase it from my brain so I could read it all over again!

The story of friendship throughout the lives of two women. Now that one of them has terminal cancer and has been admitted to a hospice, this documents their lives now and in the past. Set in the US, the healthcare situation is not familiar to me. Mostly a good and thoughtful read , Ash's life is complicated , likewise her relationship with her friend Edi. At times in the book, I thought there was too much information and the telling was drawn out, in other instances, things were quickly brushed over. Saying that, I would recommend the book .
My thanks to Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

I really enjoyed this book. It was well written with a nice storyline. The characters were well thought out with good interaction between them. Recommend

I found it hard to get into the flow of this book- feeling the story jumped around at times. It can be a hard story to read for those of us - myself included, who have family going through the various stages of cancer, but it shows the importance of friends and family to enlighten and find some joy where they can.

'We All Want Impossible Things' is a beautiful, funny and sad book about loss and dying in which the narrator Ash supports her best friend Edi as she lives out her final days in a hospice in New England.

This is a book which is brimming with warmth and love - Edi and Ash's decades-long friendship is at the heart of the novel as Ash looks back on all their shared memories, a great many involving food. There is also Edi's bond with her husband Jude and her son Dash, both back in New York, and Ash's daughters and (theoretically) estranged husband who support Ash through Edi's last weeks, as well as Ash's various simultaneous romantic partners. Above all, the hospice itself is presented with real affection as a place of great happiness and love which is more focused on living than dying.

The novel is very funny throughout - Catherine Newman emulates the style of writers like Emma Straub and Katherine Heiny in the way she creates entertaining characters whose exchanges are often hilarious in spite of (and sometimes because of) the sad events that are unfolding. I particularly enjoyed Ash's relationship with her younger daughter Belle.

At the same time, Newman offers an incredibly honest and unflinching account of the death of a loved one and is prepared to explore many of the gory details and emotional complexities of this situation without becoming too harrowing. She likewise avoids mawkishness, although there are some deeply touching passages, such as when Ash tells Edi that her son's "whole self is made completely out of your love" or when she reflects that "we risk every last thing for our heart;s expansion, even when that expanded heart threatens to suffocate us and then burst".

I really enjoyed and admired the way that this novel took such a difficult topic and explored it with compassion and clarity. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

A book about two best friends, one of them going off the rails, the other going into hospice and soon to die. Does that sound like your ideal read? Perhaps not, but I'm going to recommend you read it none the less.

It's for anybody who ever had a special friend - or wished they did.
It's for anybody who lost somebody they love - or worries that one day they will.
It's for anybody having a bit of a mid-life crisis - or wondering if they might one day.

OK, it's just a great book that, despite its sad themes, is really life-affirming. If you're going to die, go like Edi, surrounded by friends who'd do anything for you including tracking down that amazing lemon polenta cake you want to eat just one more time before you go.

Yes, it's sad. I'm not going to deny that. But it's also incredibly moving. I fear that not too many hospices are quite as liberal as this one but I wish they were. There are dogs, cats, crazy old ladies singing along to 'Fiddler on the Roof', lots of great food, people who'll turn up and sing whatever you ask them to, and a cast of the most wonderful characters.

Highly recommended.
WIth thanks to Netgalley and the publishers.