Phonopause

Anne Brown is forty, exhausted, perimenopausal-and completely bloody finished.

By day, she is a mental health nurse holding together vulnerable patients, an understaffed service and managers who treat burnout as an opportunity for mandatory resilience training.

At home, she has two ungrateful teenagers, a well-meaning partner, a hypochondriac mother, a selfish sister-and a birthday present that oscillates at three speeds.

Then a bus driver throws her into a pole.

And Anne apologises to him.

Something snaps. Or perhaps, for the first time in her life, something finally clicks into place.

A.B. Anne Brown.

From rude drivers and smug wellness gurus to workplace bullies and men who have mistaken her silence for weakness, Anne begins settling the accounts of a lifetime. Sometimes she speaks up. Sometimes she takes action. And sometimes her imagination supplies a considerably more violent solution.

But as fragments of a childhood she cannot remember begin forcing their way back, Anne's rebellion becomes something far more dangerous. Because one man from her past is still alive, still respected-and still certain that she will keep quiet.

He is about to discover that Anne Brown has stopped apologising.

Darkly funny, painfully honest and magnificently sweary, PHONOPAUSE is a furious British novel about menopause, buried trauma and one woman finally refusing to make herself smaller.

For everyone who has ever been told to calm down, be resilient or make more time for themselves.