Twelve Moons: The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you’ll read

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Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. I enjoyed some of the repetitive bits, like letting the cat in and out because it felt like the chance to get quite familiar with her and her daily life. The big messages of this book - love, recovery, independence, tenacity - are important for all of us. This line initially made me feel all the anger I had experienced with education systems but also a sense of it being a uniquely female burden of blame.

However, I believe it says that by the time the book even began, they had been separated for four years.Written with intelligence - a blend of lightness, elegance, and even the elegiac, Twelve Moons immerses you in the Northumbrian landscape, with excursions to other quiet places. It is here they can be truly themselves; the book felt just as much a love letter to the natural landscape as it did to her daughters. Caro’s world revolves around caring for her eldest, who is autistic and recovering from an illness which has temporarily robbed her of the use of her legs. I also enjoyed the references to the lunar cycles which were interwoven throughout the narrative, and provided structure. It was a gentle, moving and beautifully written account of a woman and mother on the margins, by virtue of the familial circumstances in which she found herself.

Despite articulating trepidation and uncertainty and doubt, her bravery and tenacity shine from the page as does her deep love for her children. It is to nature that the family turn to time and time again to give them strength during troubled times, never more so than when they turn to the moon in its ever-changing guises, yet setting the rhythm to the year and ever constant in their shifting lives. TWELVE MOONS follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives. Navigating single parenthood, advocating from her girls and herself - an endless battle to be heard - is isolating and exhausting. Considering the moon phases over the course of the year is something I had never consciously done before.

This memoir of Caro Giles is written in such a tone that you can't help but fall in love with her family, the moon and the landscapes of Northumberland. Would highly recommend reading over the course of a year, which I had done so up until a holiday in Northumberland which felt the right setting to finish the book. Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One. The biggest thing that riled me was Giles' constant references to her ex-husband and the almost pining quality to these sections. A passage in which the author describes having to de-register one of her children from school by the age of six was particularly emotive and hard-hitting.