A Real Piece of Work

by Freya Bromley

What does it mean for a stranger to think you’re brave? Readers called me ‘raw’ because I wrote about crying into takeaway containers and drunk texting my dead sister’s number. People wanted to believe it was fearless of me to broadcast my breakdown, but the truth was that I’d curated that messiness until it was just the right kind of chaos.

Nola McConkey has made it. Animal Oracle, the memoir she has written about her beloved late sister Darina, has become a hit. People read it, critics loved it, producers now want to make it into a movie. The dream of quitting her job and becoming a full-time writer in London doesn’t seem so far away. There’s only one everyone in her family has an opinion about the book – and none of them are good. Though Nola can’t let it affect her. It’s the price she must pay for the life she wants.

But now, someone has made an anonymous complaint to her publisher about Animal Oracle. Suddenly, her hard-won reputation as a literary darling is at stake. Nola is sure that only someone in her secretive, chaotic family could be to blame. As her parents and three remaining siblings prepare to spend the fifth anniversary of Darina’s death together on the isolated island of Lundy, Nola knows this is the perfect opportunity to convince her accuser to pull the complaint before it causes irreparable damage – but first, she must discover who made it.

A Real Piece of Work is a sparkling and spiky story of complicated families and even more complicated sisters, exploring who owns grief and who gets to tell the story of those who are gone and those left behind with tenderness, nuance and wit.

Genres: Fiction

353 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 11, 2026

About the author

Freya Bromley is a writer living in London. Her work explores love, loss and the restorative power of nature. Her first book The Tidal Year was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2023. And in 2026 she released her debut novel A Real Piece of Work.

Reviews

[Kane Perry]

Absolutely loved this. So genuine and raw. An excellent portrait of the different ways a family deals with grief and how this impacts their dynamics. It is a novel that provides perspective and reminds us what’s truly important.

[Ross]

an excellent and intricate portrait of a complex family navigating grief

[Emily Roach]

Loved the concept of this book! Adore the way she portrayed sibling dynamics in particular. Looking forward to seeing what she writes next

[Kerry]

Well… what a debut. I enjoyed Freya’s memoir, ‘The Tidal Year’, so I was keen to get a proof of her upcoming debut novel.

I’d describe this book as an ode to the enduring bond between siblings, not painted in a matching-pyjama-wearing familial ideal, but exactly as these relationships often are: complicated, nostalgic, infuriating and sustaining. I thought the relationships with her brothers were particularly well-captured and felt true to life — who else but a brother could know exactly what to say to piss you off, but you’ll also agree to a middle of the night adventure with?

The novel charts the ebbs and flows of disdain, love and the tangled net of grief Nola’s family find themselves in after Darina’s death, and the experience of being raised in the same family and each emerging different people.

One of the things that draws me most to Freya’s writing is how she writes nature in an accessible and city-literate way. Much like after reading ‘The Tidal Year’, I felt simultaneously inspired to spend some more time outside *and* as though I had just spent some time in nature. The prose is addictive and woven with well-considered metaphors, most of which are nature themed. I particularly enjoyed the ways light was described in both Lundy and London.

Final thought — I don’t think Freya gets enough credit for her humour, it has that rare quality of still being funny when read out loud.

Everyone’s in for a treat in June when this comes out and they get to spend some time in Lundy with the lighting storm that is the McConkey family. Get this on your TBR now.

Congratulations, Freya.

[tara]

i devoured this but i also didn’t want it to end. it felt very personal to me in ways i didn’t expect. it’s one of those books that found me when i needed it through a layered fabric of circumstance and i am very grateful it did

i loved the setting and the character building in this the most. i felt like i knew them all deeply, and could picture everywhere this story took place. there’s a lot that happens in this book and it’s quite dense but never heavy. it touches on family, relationships, grief, writing and memory. no pages felt wasted

[Sahar]

4.5 stars. A beautiful and realistic portrayal of grief and complicated family dynamics.

[Kath]

I absolutely gobbled this book up! Freya’s writing is at once beautifully poetic and full of wit and astute observations on love, friendship, families and grief. She handles both the Big Themes and smaller minutiae of life with both care and humour, and there is much in her wonderfully crafted characters that is very relatable. Her descriptions of the locality of place are rich and blooming, and take you easily between the wild landscape of Lundy and the everyday slog and excitement of London. I very much felt I was living in the London I know with Nola while adventuring elsewhere with her too. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a friend, a sibling, a lover. I can’t wait to read this book again!

[Jillwilson]

I was reading this book when I went to lunch with my partner’s family. It made the complexities of family dynamics swirl around in my head like a crazy washing machine. It’s what the writer of this novel captures well – the undercurrents, insecurities and jealousies that play out between siblings, and from parents to adult children.

Main character Nola is part of a family struggling after the unexpected death of Nola’s sister Darina when she is in her later twenties. She dies in her sleep. It rocks the entire family – then there is a second earthquake when Nola chooses to write a very candid ‘memoir” about her sister and her family. There is some unhappiness amongst her surviving brothers, sister and parents about how Nola has depicted them.

The family reunites five years after Darina’s death to lay her ashes to rest. It is a tense and fraught week on a small island (Lundy Island) off the west coast of Great Britain. Nola has to try to get permission from each person for the use of her memoir in a proposed film. And oner family member has anonymously complained to the publisher about the memoir. So part of the tension is finding out who the “pierce of work” is who is making trouble for Nola. Or is she the pierce of work? Or is the book itself a questioning of the extent to which a memoir can be a “real piece of work”.

There is some reality to this story. Bromley has also lost a sibling and written a book about that loss. Here she says: “When my memoir about my life after my brother’s death was published, I was very fortunate that people connected with it. It’s not easy to feel good fortune from the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. But I suppose I felt pleased when the experience that had once made me so lonely suddenly became a point of connection.
I had not always been an open book. I was 22 when my brother died from a rare bone cancer. The people around me didn’t know what to say about this awful thing, so they pretended it hadn’t happened and I pretended, too. For a few years I was a ghost in my own life. Nothing felt real. I got very good at imitating normality, imagining I was in a video game called Office.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...)

Of this book, Bromley says: “I wanted this fictional world to be an offering to everyone I’d met – a reckoning with what becomes of a family once the funeral is over. How do our relationships shift when life-changing loss ruptures our existing dynamics?” I think she makes quite a good job of doing this.

[Polly Jenefer]

I loved Freya's memoir The Tidal Year, so when she announced her fiction debut, I jumped at the chance to request it!

We're in Nola's POV, she's just released her first book, a memoir about losing her sister. We follow her while dealing with the subsequent family fallout and reconciliation. Having read Freya's memoir, I couldn't help but see similarities and parallels, leading me to believe the feelings in this novel are very real. This was reinforced by the fictional Nola saying something to that effect about her memoir and next work of fiction.

Love the premise, I'm not sure how much we, as the general public, think about the impact of something so personal as a memoir, especially one about losing a loved one. Everything is subjective, there's always missing context, not quite secrets, but things that go unmentioned and therefore create misinterpretations and differing narratives.

I'm not going to lie, the characters were all insufferable, even her late sister. We got to see their dynamic in flashbacks, and the advice she was giving her little sister and the choices she was making had me shaking my head every single time. Conor was the only exception. Nola is better than me because if my family members talked to me like hers did, her parents' out-of-pocket statements, especially, we wouldn't have a relationship to work on at all.

This was a story about grief, complicated sibling dynamics/ parental figures, how your lived experiences shape you, and then despite it all, moving forward and paving your own path.
I enjoyed the descriptions of Lundy, its nature and animals. Freya weaves nature elements into her city scenes too, which I love. I live in the countryside myself and often forget that cities aren't devoid of nature if you know where to look.

It was a slower read than I expected, and I would have loved to see Nola argue back more tenaciously. I felt her backbone was flimsy at times.

Overall, it was a great read, choked me up on multiple occasions and had me ruminating on my own family and the ways in which we need to show up for each other. I look forward to future works.

Thank you to Netgalley and Cornerstone for allowing me to read an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Chris L.]

Freya Bromley’s ‘A Real Piece of Work’ is a continuation of the themes of grief and how to write about loss after the publication of her memoir, ‘The Tidal Year.’ Like Bromley, the heroine of ‘A Real Piece of Work’ has written a memoir about the loss of a sibling, and Nola must deal with the turmoil that follows the publication of her novel. Her family members are not happy with how they are portrayed, and she receives an anonymous complaint about the book. It’s this complaint that propels the narrative of the book. It forces Nola to look at why she wrote the memoir, and how the memoir fits in with her relationships to her family.

I felt for Nola because I am not sure I could have dealt with her family. They came across as completely self-involved and did not seem to understand why Nola would want to write the book or to make a career from her writing. They seemed way too invested in their petty grievances. In their defence, they see Nola as profiting from their pain. If you’ve lost a daughter or sibling, the last thing you want is for your pain to be exposed to the world. Since we see the story from Nola’s POV, we obviously sympathise with her struggles.

I think what separates this from a memoir is that we allow fictional characters to be more messy. We’re much harder on real-life people, and so Bromley allows her characters (including Nola) to make mistakes, and to not say the right things while they are grieving and processing their pain. Bromley deftly points out that authors can share their pain on the page, but readers often forget about the real-life grief. They want to share their pain and devastations. The grief memoir becomes a way for them to give voice to their own pain. The grieving author has to listen to these performances of grief, and Bromley captures these moments perfectly.

Until this novel, I had never thought about what it must be like to go on a book tour for a book about the death of a loved one. This fictional book has more realism and depth than most nonfiction works. Freya Bromley’s ‘A Real Piece of Work’ is a challenging piece of fiction, but it’s one that is worth the effort. It’s a gorgeous meditation on what it means to lose someone, and how we cope with the waves of grief that crash down upon us.

[Juliano]

“I’d learned too late that the responsibility of writing is not just to omit the big things. The small things hurt just as much, because the small things are what make families real.” I was worried when I first heard about Freya Bromley’s debut novel, A Real Piece of Work, that I might struggle to enjoy it without comparing it to my own, given the thematic overlap (family dynamics / narratives, familial grief, how we make meaning out of tragedy). I was lucky in two ways: firstly, Bromley explores these things so differently, and secondly, her novel is riotously fun to read (a massive difference, lol). The last I’ll say about my own book is that anyone who liked it should absolutely read Bromley’s clever, propulsive, hilariously observed novel. Her protagonist, Nola, has put out a memoir about her sister’s death, and then is rocked by the revelation that someone has made an anonymous complaint to her publisher, jeopardising everything. She knows it must be a family member, probably her dad who “had a breakdown in Adobe Acrobat” when he read the draft, and so she agrees to go along on their trip to Lundy island — a trip to mark the fifth anniversary of her sister’s death — to find out who has betrayed her. It’s like being a fly on the wall at your family’s most dysfunctional moments, nail-bitingly tense, sharply and sometimes awkwardly hilarious. But there’s also a real wealth of emotional insight throughout, around grief, attachment, family. There’s a conversation between Nola and her brother Connor towards the end of the book that floored me, in which he comments on the gulf between what she thinks she needs vs actually needs. Between that and the zingers (Darina proclaims that one “should never sleep with someone who doesn’t own a printer”), it’s a continuously enjoyable read populated by characters who are constantly being pretty awful but still end up being loveable — my favourite kind.

[Cate Murray]

This was beautiful!

‘A Real Piece of Work’ is a tender and sweet novel about a grieving family. Nola has written a sort of memoir about her late sister Darina and we follow her through her life as the book gains popularity and her family grow more resentful.

It’s a very interesting book when it comes to the author’s writing style. At many points, it’s fairly simplistic (not actual quotes): ‘I pulled my hand through my curly hair.’, ‘I drank wine from my glass.’. But then, Bromley will just hit you with the most gut wrenching line ever that you will be thinking about for hours after you closed the book. Bromley’s style is unique and quiet, not over stressing things but fitting gently into the mind of her character (who is also a writer) and who often sees the world through a stained glass window.

Nothing is revealed as a massive surprise or hyped up, it is just told. When a large part of Darina’s story is narrated to us in a very matter of fact way which somehow makes it even more painful. I enjoyed the lack of overdramatised moments as often in family centred novels, it can feel a little too staged. It’s an incredibly real piece, one you can maybe see your own family in.

Bromley has a skill at creating unique characters, showing us how the deal with the grief of their loved one with Darina herself being a powerhouse and a wonderful soul we had the privilege of knowing. I found myself to-ing and fro-ing between family members, deciding which side was better but in truth, family is not perfect and Bromley portrayed that fact excellently.

A gorgeous novel. Thank you to Hutchinson and Heinemann/Penguin Random House for my copy of the lovely lovely book. It’s out this June!

[Natalie Beecroft]

I loved Freya Bromley's memoir The Tidal Year so I was very excited for her debut novel. I loved this, and it was very cleverly meta and humourously self-deprecating, which offered levity against the heartbreaking subject matter.

It follows an author called Nola who's writen an extremely successful memoir about the death of her sibling and her own working through of grief, with a love story woven in. Nola is even nervous about writing her first novel, which Freya captures so well. The fictional memoir, Animal Oracle, is seen throughout A Real Piece of Work as extracts, and you also learn that parts of the memoir are embellished or fictionalised for effect.

I liked the whodunnit element but it didn't seem so important by the end, and was sort of glossed over, but I see that the story needed the driving force of the anxiety of not knowing who had complained about her memoir.

It's continually clever and nuaced, and also captures all the messiness of the family dynamics, and each grief being different. The characters were super strong, believeable and well-rounded, especially all the siblings. The boat scene was so absurd and simultaneously hilarious and upsetting. It makes lots of interesting points about the act of writing 'real' stories, who gets to tell them, what is included or not, the different offences people can take, what is 'raw' and authentic and what narrative can be curated by writing. The title is a clever double meaning too, which I appreciate. Will be recommending!

[Jan]

Freya Bromley’s A Real Piece of Work continues her exploration of grief following her memoir The Tidal Year. The novel follows Nola, whose memoir about losing her sister sparks family conflict and an anonymous complaint, forcing her to confront why she wrote the book and the cost of turning private grief into public art.

Bromley’s portrayal of grief is raw and messy. She doesn’t idolise the dead, and let Darina be a human with flaws and complexity. As the timeline shifts, we rely on fragments of memories of Nola and the family. I deeply sympathised with Nola; she is definitely a better person than me. Her family seemed unable to understand her need to write or build a career from her story, focusing instead on their own grievances. At times, the siblings are simply insufferable; and, the parents frustrate me pretty much throughout the book. Bromley gives weight to their perspective though: when you’ve lost a loved one, seeing that grief shared publicly can feel like an act of betrayal.

I, in the end, have found myself thinking about who would own my story once I am gone, and would I want to become a public narrative. Also, shoutout to the fictional memoir, Animal Oracle, which could become a book on its own merit.

[Jennifer Richards]

I absolutely loved this. The author writes about nature, family dynamics, and the relationships between siblings and how they shape you so well. I loved The Tidal Year and always wonder if I will like an author’s fiction as much as their non-fiction, I needn’t have worried. It felt so meta in such a good way - the excerpts of Animal Oracle within the book were so clever. It was also pitch perfect in terms of growing up in London in your late twenties/early thirties - all the references were spot on e.g. going to see Deborah Levy at the Southbank Centre. It made me laugh out loud at various points e.g. Will’s Huel sachet for his half marathon training. I can’t wait to see what the author writes next.

[mcgahernstan420]

I gobbled this book up in a day.

I loved the portrait of the McConkey family and how pitch perfect all the spiky holiday scenes were. The family histories and tensions are written in a way which feels nerve-janglingly real. I also really enjoyed the way Nola’s memoir was woven in with the main narrative and you could trace her inspirations, references and muses throughout.

Only docking a star because I was less interested in Nola’s romantic anxieties than really getting into the nitty gritty of her relationships with her family. I know that Animal Oracle needed a happy ending, it just wasn’t for me!

A fabulous novel — can’t wait to see what Bromley does next. 🌟🌟🌟🌟

[Ellie Moon]

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone for providing me with an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.
A poignant story of grief and family, Freya Bromley artfully navigates the narrative contours of loss and identity. I found many members of the family insufferable, which made for a tough read at times. I also felt that some aspects of the story could have been built on more strongly, such as a major plot point which was shared and then not expounded on further. Overall, an artful and deeply human piece of work. I enjoyed this one, and look forward to more by Bromley.

[Natasha]

There is no denying that Freya's writing is stunning. Her scene setting is phenomenal. Having been to Lundy and lived in Hackney- during the period she was writing, I had an immense feeling of nostalgia whilst reading about these places. I enjoyed the story, but for me there was too much scene setting and found myself skimming until I found some speech marks, particularly after they left the island. I was also disappointed by the ending, but I've just come off the back of a long fantasy run, where endings tend to get tied up happily with a bow, perhaps this was just 'real life'.

[Annette Morris]

"Books mostly exist to give people permission to feel things." Says Nola McConkey who's written a memoir about life with her (now dead) sister and the aftermath of her death. And this book made me laugh and cringe with recognition. The family exchanges are brilliantly observed and pitch perfect in execution. It's about love, loss, grief, guilt, the secrets we keep, forgiveness, memory and writing. But most of all about a big, messy family dealing with grief. And although it's marketed as a novel it reads like an actual, real memoir. Is it?

[Angèle Chevalier]

I was super impressed with Freya Bromley’s second book and couldn’t put it down. A ingenious account of writing memoir, the downfalls it can have on family dynamics, and how writing non fiction often makes people wonder - what becomes material? Who does the story belong to? I really enjoyed this, thought it was beautifully narrated and portrayed family dynamics in a very accurate fashion. I also really liked the passages from the “book” the narrator had written, and the connectirs with the animals. Felt very vivid. A good idea for a book itself. A book within a book?

[Mitsy_Reads]

A stunning exploration of complex family dynamics and how they grieve differently. It is fictional but reads like a personal memoir, intimate and honest.

I particularly enjoyed the book-within-a-book structure and the author’s smooth writing. Quiet and nuanced, but with a poignancy that sharply pierced my heart sometimes. The seaside ambience is beautifully crafted as well. A beautiful book, perfect for summer.

4-4.5 /5

[ruthie]

I devoured this in one sitting. I loved Nola and her family, and despite the subject matter it felt like a comforting read. I’ve since found Freya’s The Tidal Year on Libby which I know is the inspiration behind Nola’s Animal Oracle ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

[Mimi]

I love all of Freya's writing - I love the concept of the book within the book, and her writing about sisters is heartfelt. All the characters are intricate and distinct. Her tone is calming and gentle.

[C]

Three and a half stars. She’s written a book about grief and her dead sister, but her family are all offended in different ways, and everyone’s truth is a bit different. Good characters, good writing but somehow I still didn’t feel that immersed.

[Lucy Skeet]

I really, really liked this one! Thanks so much to HH for my copy

[LX]

Thank you so much for the proof!


Oooof this hits hard. What a way to show the dynamics of family, grief. And in ways how we can remember people.

Wow

[Lizzie Frainier]

I loved Freya’s memoir, so I was really excited for this and it did not disappoint. Once again, she writes beautifully about love, life and grief — and nature too.

[Freya Bromley]

I had a lot of fun writing this book and I'm so proud of it. I hope you enjoy reading it! ☺️

[Sophie]

4.5*

Brilliant

[Ahmed Kabil]

An astonishing debut!