This hypnotically written debut memoir, all about claiming a bolder, more risk-taking life, reads like a fable.

A tender but ferocious memoir... to awaken, to see the world with such freshness, to "become an explorer of the everyday and break new ground in it" - we could all do with a bit more of that.

Absorbing . . . robust, declarative even, but there is also something disquieting in this memoir . . . for Shadrick, to be a woman, an artist and a mother still seems something not quite of this world: a fairy tale that puzzles her even though - or perhaps because - it came true

Thoughtful, poetically articulate . . . ambitious in its scope, a memoir telling her journey from rural working-class Devon to where she is today