Published By: HarperCollins
pages: 384
Released On: 26/02/2026
Can one small note give her the courage to find a new path? One Note. One Act of kindness. Her new beginning is closer than she thinks.
Kate gave up her dreams of being a painter years ago. But six little words pinned to the noticeboard of her local café could change her path forever.
‘To be, or not to be…’ – printed on orange card with no explanation – appears one morning.
Each day, a new line from a different Shakespeare play is added, sparking curiosity throughout the café. Among the regulars is Bardy, a retired English teacher grappling with writer’s block.
As Kate and Bardy follow this breadcrumb trail, they discover a local community group encouraging people to rediscover their own creative spark – and the long-lost courage to chase it.
For Kate, their new group might just offer a second chance at happiness, if only Bardy can find the strength to share his story too…
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I LOVE Sally’s books and I’m always thrilled to get a new one to read.
Sally has this ability to write about painful experiences but infuse it with such light and love and happiness and hope. It’s a real joy to read. Whilst the characters might have done through something difficult and their stories are not always happy, I have never left a book feeling anything other than uplifted. They’re good for the soul.
It can be difficult to depict colour and beauty and art in words, but she’s managed it beautifully. The same with the description of nature and silence and wildlife and peace and being at one with nature.
There are some fabulous characters and they’re mostly all loveable. They’re so real and familiar and flawed and recognisable.
It’s a passionate plea about the importance of friendship, community, and how family is more than just blood. About second chances, about achieving your dreams, especially as our main protagonists are older characters, they can often feel like they’re too old to do anything new but that’s not right.
I loved that she added a touch of synaesthesia in it, that ability to see colours. I don’t know what it’s actually like to live with it, it might be horrible, but from my layman’s perspective it sounds really beautiful to be able to see the colour of other people’s souls., as it were.
There’s not much in the way of real hard-hitting plot, but I don’t mean that as a negative. I love character-driven stories rather than plot, and so I really preferred that this is more about the characters themselves than what they are actually doing.
This is going to sound like a negative, because the word is normally seen as a negative, but I don’t mean it that way. But it feels a bit disjointed. And the reason I take that as a positive is that Sally has done such a deep dive into the characters’ emotions that their thoughts and feelings and speech often overlap each other, along with the added ‘seeing colours’ element, which adds to the disjointed nature, and I think it really works. It makes it busy and imperfect, and I think that is what actually makes it perfect because that’s how people are in real life. So for me, it made me more involved and care more for the characters than if they were too….clinical, too perfect, too structured. I think this is a much better way of depicting the characters and their stories.
I’ve read all of her books and I have to say The Book of Beginnings is still my favourite, but this is still a remarkable, accomplished novel, full of love and joy and hope and magic. It really is a tonic.
Books By Your Bedside 