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  • Published: 21 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241451182
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

One Day I Shall Astonish the World




From the prize-winning author of Reasons to be Cheerful comes a story about the ebb and flow of female friendship over half a lifetime

Susan and Norma have been best friends for years, at first thrust together by force of circumstance (a job at The Pin Cushion, a haberdashery shop in 1990s Leicestershire) and then by force of character (neither being particularly inclined to make friends with anyone else). But now, thirty years later, faced with a husband seeking immortality and Norma out of reach on a wave of professional glory, Susan begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices about life, love, work, and, most importantly, friendship.

Nina Stibbe's new novel is the story of the wonderful and sometimes surprising path of friendship: from its conspiratorial beginnings, along its irritating wrong turns, to its final gratifying destination.

  • Published: 21 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241451182
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the author

Nina Stibbe

Nina Stibbe was born in Leicester. She is the author of two works of non-fiction - Love, Nina and An Almost Perfect Christmas - and three previous novels: Man at the Helm, Paradise Lodge, and Reasons to be Cheerful, which is the only novel to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award. Love, Nina won Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series. Nina Stibbe lives in Cornwall.

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Praise for One Day I Shall Astonish the World

Funny, charming, odd-in-the-best-way and gorgeously uplifting! A delight from start to finish

Marian Keyes on 'Reasons to be Cheerful'

Stibbe is one of the all-time greats

Daisy Buchanan

Joyful. Stibbe's comedy probes what it means to become an adult

Daily Telegraph on 'Reasons to be Cheerful'

Pitch perfect vintage comedy

Guardian on 'Reasons to be Cheerful'

Very few writers can find the delicate balance between heartbreak and hilarity like Nina Stibbe

Red Magazine