' Funny, exciting, vulnerable - truly visionary.' Alexander Chee Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realised she had almost signed up to live somebody else's life. In this intimate, frank and funny memoir in essays, CJ Hauser releases herself from her story of 'how life was supposed to be'. She goes looking for more honest ways of living, for new definitions of love. She kisses internet strangers, officiates a wedding, visits a fertility clinic. She rereads Rebecca in the house her new boyfriend shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to ask whether you can ever have a fresh start with an old love. She writes about friends and lovers and blood family and chosen family and children and animals and ghosts and a whole planet in this book, and hopes you see all of these as love stories.

The Crane Wife is a book for anyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for anyone learning to find joy in the unexpected; for anyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in. 'I absolutely LOVED these essays. I knew I ought to ration myself to one a day in order to prolong the joy and fascination of them, but I just couldn't: I had to carry on reading and reading, like eating a whole packet of jelly babies in one sitting. What a fantastic, original, funny and touching voice! C J Hauser is a wondrous writer. This book which will give so much happiness.' CRESSIDA CONNOLLY, author of AFTER THE PARTY 'Compassionate and funny and brave. The book is a masterclass in life writing, and a lesson in how to live a life outside the narratives that would contain us. CJ is a master story weaver.

I was left wanting more, in the best way possible.' CHARLIE GILMOUR, author of FEATHERHOOD.