Will losing her Dad be the thing that finally prompts Annie Stanley to find herself?
Only she could decide to say goodbye by stealing her father's ashes and taking him on one last adventure . . .
Annie Stanley is single, unemployed and just a bit stuck when her beloved father dies suddenly. Furious at her stepmother’s plans to scatter his ashes in Austria, the site of the couple's last holiday, Annie decides to take the urn, without the rest of the family’s consent, on a tour of the 31 sea areas that make up the shipping forecast. It's fair to say it's not a particularly well-thought-through plan – like so many in Annie's life – but she reasons that her father used to love listening to the shipping forecast, despite spending his life in landlocked St Albans.
Travelling around the coastline of Britain searching for the perfect place to say goodbye, Annie meets a unique cast of characters and reconnects with various figures from her past, including her boyband-obsessed childhood best friend, a straight-talking 77 year-old widow, and her ex-boyfriend’s teenage son. As she works through her grief and tries to fix her combative relationship with both her step-mother and her sister, she starts to wonder if it might be time to re-think some of the other decisions in her life – including breaking up with her ex… But is it too late for a second chance?
A novel about love, loss, and the importance of living life to the full, Annie Stanley, All at Sea is proof that it’s often the most difficult moments in life that show us what really matters.
