It Might Not Be True

Francesca Rhydderch is a novelist, translator and short story writer who has previously won the Wales Book of the Year Award for Fiction for her debut The Rice Paper Diaries. Her stories have been widely anthologised and broadcast on Radio Wales and Radio 4. She was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award for The Taxidermist's Daughter. Following a recent medical diagnosis she is learning to live a new life, a quieter existence which brings its own moments of joy. When she isn't walking or writing at her own pace, she can be found in the company of her friends, family and a dog named Bean.

Francesca Rhydderch is certain that she’s chronically ill, but her doctors disagree. Twelve months later she can’t even walk down the street, and her latest consultant is still suggesting that her neurological problems will just go away on their own. Then she comes across a specialist who changes the course of her illness. She may well be in danger of fighting a losing battle – with time, memory, herself – but she learns there are ways to live in the present by making peace with the past.Some names have been changed to protect privacy."A delicate masterpiece. In precise yet lambent prose, Francesca Rhydderch’s memoir is a painfully beautiful portrait of not just her life, but also the fundamentals of all our lives. A quiet, clear-eyed mediation on family, childhood, illness, grief, literature and love. Moving and illuminating in equal measure, there are scenes, lines and phrases from It Might Not be True that will remain with me for a very long time." – Owen Sheers"Beautifully subtle and moving, vivid in its painful present and reaching deep into the past…" – Tessa Hadley“They say time stops still in moments of crisis, yet in this intimate and poignant portrait Rhydderch uses her craft to demonstrate a more complex distortion in which time stretches and gapes, shrinks and magnifies, passes and returns in sequences that cohere a past, the present and a future. This evocative little gem truly provides a life lesson.” Charlotte Williams