A Grave Mistake – Paperback

She showed up forty minutes late to a funeral. It was the wrong one.

Chronically overwhelmed Manchester wedding-cellist Nell Ashworth ducks into the only occupied chapel she can find and delivers the most heartfelt, gloriously improvised eulogy of her life – for a man she has never met. By the time she realises her actual great-aunt’s service finished in the room next door, she’s already crashed straight into Owen Marsh: the dead man’s dryly amused, infuriatingly steady grandson, who refuses to let her spiral alone.

Owen says her accidental words finally cracked open the grief his tight-lipped family was too frozen to feel. His mother lovingly drafts “the woman who knew Bernard” into planning the memorial. And Nell – who has spent her whole life slipping out of rooms before anyone can need her – says nothing. The kindness curdles into a lie. The lie has weeks to grow. And the only way to become the woman who finally stays is to stand up, uninvited, and tell the mortifying truth out loud.

A warm, laugh-out-loud open-door rom-com for fans of Mhairi McFarlane and Sophie Kinsella.