The story of one girl’s quest for clarity and forgiveness after an awful, universe-gone-mad-mistake. From the internationally bestselling author of Girl in Pieces

‘Breathtaking and heartbreaking, and I loved it with all my heart.’ Jennifer Niven

I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn’t done with me. 

It’s always been Tiger and her mother against the world. Then, on a day like any other, Tiger’s mother dies. Now it’s Tiger, alone.

And she must learn to make friends with the dark.

‘A rare and powerful novel…dives deep into the heart of grief and healing with honesty, empathy, and grace.’ Karen M. McManus

‘Magnificent. A beautiful, heartbreaking alleluia to survival.’ Brendan Kiely

I wrote How to Make Friends With the Dark because I miss my mother and my sister. They have both been gone for several years, but everyday is still waking up without them and trying to go on. Every day is a new process of learning grief and its mysteries, the way the smell of a face cream can bring back years-old memories. The way a scene in a television show can bring back the sound of my sister’s laughter, a memory that makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Once, a friend who lost her mother when she was very young said she’d wished her mother had left her a letter telling her how to live without her, because years and years later, she still did not know how.

I wrote How to Make Friends With the Dark as a kind of how-to about death and grief, a manual of the pain that can leave you breathless, a primer on the love that lives in your heart, as much as you might be hurting. And I wrote this book as a letter to kids like Thaddeus and Sarah and Len, kids without parents, kids just trying to survive in a world that sometimes doesn’t seem to have room for them.

A heartbreaking, triumphant, funny and hopeful story of one girl’s battle with self harm

Charlie Davis is in pieces. At seventeen, she’s already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget it through cutting; the pain washes out the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. She doesn’t have to think about her father or what happened under the bridge. Her best friend, Ellis, who is gone forever. Or the mother who has nothing left to give her. Kicked out of a special treatment center when her insurance runs out, Charlie finds herself in the bright and wild landscape of Tucson, Arizona, where she begins the unthinkable: the long journey of putting herself back together.