Amanda Brookfield

Sometimes, you write a thing in a story and then it happens for real. During the course of a career now spanning several decades and 20 books, there have been enough instances of it for me not to be that surprised. Usually it’s been trivial: like making a ginger cat arrive in a character’s life not long before one barged into mine. Occasionally it’s been more tragic: like me deciding to put a protagonist through the ordeal of losing a baby in utero just a few months before close relatives endured exactly the same horror. The fact is, stuff happens. And I write about stuff, so ‘coincidences’, however brutal, are inevitable. At least that is what I have always told myself.

But then 2025 had a bigger, more personal punch in store. The year began normally enough with three months of intense final revisions on ‘The Twin’, my new novel. By March, I was done and jubilant. Until the discovery, just a few weeks later via a regular screening test, that I had bowel cancer – an advanced version, with a liver metastasis. There had been no symptoms.

In the immediate aftermath of head-spinning shock, my thoughts kept pinging back to the story I had so recently finished. ‘The Twin’ isn’t remotely about cancer, but it has cancer in it. Quite a lot, in fact. The book had taken me the usual eighteen months or so to write, exactly the sort of time-span the tumour would have needed to get such a grip. Could this mean that I had somehow brought my health calamity upon myself…?

Ha ha – of course not! I was simply sick and a little bonkers with early panic. But the notion did get me thinking along the slightly less bonkers track of whether some sort of ‘prescience’ could have been in play. By which I mean that somewhere, deep in my subconscious, there might have lain the knowledge that I was unwell; a knowledge that pressed itself upon the edges of my imagination as I wrote. Human beings are full of mystery after all, especially when it comes to the workings of the brain. We don’t understand the half of it.

‘The Twin’ was published in July, as planned, to lovely reviews. By then I was in the thick of treatment, as I shall be for some time to come, my energies mostly channelled against the vileness of side-effects. But each appreciative reader has made me so happy! Indeed, despite everything, and perhaps even weirder than my wild theories about the workings of the subconscious, I can honestly say that 2025 has been a year full of joy. How could it not be, with the tsunami of loving-kindness – from family, friends, doctors, acquaintances, total strangers – that has been coming my way, literally sweeping me off my feet. Carrying me. And then there’s the new, sharpened focus on the daily miracle of being on this planet, with every moment of every hour of every day gleaming like the treasure it is. LIFE! It is so precious. So fleeting. So inexplicable. So glorious!

Bring on 2026...

Amanda x