Showing results by author "Clover Stroud" in All Categories

Clover Stroud's idyllic childhood in rural England was shattered when a horrific riding accident left her mother permanently brain-damaged. Just 16, she embarked on a journey to find the sense of home that had been so savagely broken. Travelling from gypsy camps in Ireland, to the rodeos of West Texas and then to Russia's war-torn Caucasus, Clover eventually found her way back to England's lyrical Vale of the White Horse.

Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair.

Clover's eldest children are leaving home for university. Her husband Pete's work is in America. The only way for Clover and the younger children to live with him is to uproot, leave their rural life near the ancient Ridgeway in Oxfordshire and move to Washington DC. Forced to leave the home she loves and consider these questions, Clover sets out to explore the place where she lives, walk the Ridgway, understand a little of the history of her landscape and work out why it is that it is so hard for her to go.

A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged 46. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. It is an audiobook about what life feels like when death interrupts it and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another and the wonder of being human.

What does being brave really mean? What can we learn from other people’s acts of bravery? In this new series, Sunday Times bestselling author, Clover Stroud, shares moving conversations about the tiny acts of bravery that make up our everyday lives. When Clover was 16, she was sent on a journey to look for brave people to guide her after her mum had an accident that left her chronically brain-damaged. Clover is now continuing that search with Tiny Acts of Bravery. Each episode features a guest sharing times when they have had to be brave, to teach us how to face our own challenges to live...