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How to Be Hopeful
  • Published: 17 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529988871
  • Imprint: Ebury Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

How to Be Hopeful

My year of living joyfully

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
15 Sept 2026
Hardback
17 Oct 2026
EBook
17 Sept 2026
Audiobook
17 Sept 2026
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A joyful journey into how to live more hopefully in hard times, from million-copy Sunday Times bestseller Caitlin Moran - perfect for fans of Wintering.

Not getting enough sleep, doomscrolling on your phone, and feeling acid anxiety every time you watch the news? You’re not alone. One morning, Caitlin Moran lay in bed and realised: she had finally reached Peak Despair. The point where, in books and movies, the heroine decides to move to a remote farmhouse, walk an ancient, 600-mile pathway, or adopt a baby hare. The moment where someone goes on a quest to find … hope.

But this - this is not that kind of book. Caitlin tried - but it turns out remote Welsh farmhouses are really expensive. No-one with a job can walk 600 miles. And it’s incredibly hard to get access to baby hares in Crouch End.

And so, Caitlin decides instead to go on a domestic quest. To see if you can stay in the same house, in the same neighbourhood, but feel better about the frantic modern world by trying to make better days. Leaving social media, eschewing 24/7 news for local newspapers, sitting on buses without headphones, and listening to what people are really saying. Picking litter, donating blood, rewilding a garden, and the hardest thing of all - learning to fall back in love with the world again.

Over the course of a year, Caitlin finds that life can be radically transformed when you rebel against the news cycle and algorithms that want to keep us angry, adrenalised, and anxious. You can’t change the world - but you can change your days. And, once you’ve changed your days, maybe you could change the world. Just a little bit.

Being hopeful is a decision. How To Be Hopeful is the diary of how one person made that change.
  • Published: 17 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529988871
  • Imprint: Ebury Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran is the eldest of eight children, home educated on a council estate in Woverhampton. She published her first novel at 16 and became a columnist at The Times at 18. She has won Columnist of the Year seven times and has also been named Interviewer and Critic of the Year. Her million-selling groundbreaking feminist memoir How to be a Woman was voted one of the Sunday Times ‘Most Important Books of the Twenty-First Century’. Caitlin's other books have also been bestsellers and How to Build a Girl was made into a film with Beanie Feldstein and Emma Thompson. Her Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves, co-written with her sister Caroline Moran, won a Rose d’Or for Best Sitcom. Her Who’s Who entry lists her interests as 'cava, eyeliner, hair embiggening, and The Struggle'. She lives in North London with her husband and two children, and, after following all her own advice, she really is hopeful now.
portrait photo of Caitlin Moran

Also by Caitlin Moran

What About Men?
How To Be a Woman Quick Reads 2021
More Than a Woman
How to be Famous
Moranifesto
How to Build a Girl
Are Men Obsolete?
See all

Praise for How to Be Hopeful

This might just be the best "wellbeing" book I've ever read. It made me laugh, cry, and reflect deeply on the last decade of anxiety-inducing internet life. Caitlin has done what she does best: holding up a mirror to some of our harshest modern realities with playful storytelling, wit, and wonder. This book made me realise just how unkind so many of us have been to ourselves in this fast-paced, status-obsessed world. It reminded me that we might all be better off spending more time sitting in the garden, watching the birds... and maybe even buying a Streetmaster Pro.

Emma Gannon, author of 'The Success Myth' and 'The Creative Compass'

Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham, all rolled into one.

Marie Claire

If you don’t know who Caitlin Moran is, it may be time to find out.

The New York Times

Profound, funny and true

Lauren Laverne

A life-changer and a minor bible for our times

Emma Thompson

A bloody wonderful book. A book of hope in these seemingly hopeless, doom-ridden times. Caitlin has magically caught the zeitgeist, turned it into a nail and then knocked it on the head. I found myself laughing and crying in equal measure: it is so resonant, so of this moment. I felt lighter and happier for having read it.

Jennifer Saunders