She didn't plan the escape. She just booked it.
Mara Flynn is thirty-eight, burned out, and quietly exhausted by a life that looks exactly right from the outside. On a Tuesday night in a too-clean flat in London, she opens her laptop and types three words into a search bar: remote cottage Ireland sea.
Seven days later she is standing at the edge of a headland in County Clare, looking at the Atlantic, and beginning to understand that she hasn't just come for a holiday.
Set against the wild, luminous coastline of West Clare - the Burren, the Loop Head Peninsula, the dolphin-filled waters of Kilkee - You Deserve This Escape is a warm, beautifully written novel about a woman who finds the courage to want her own life back.
Along the way she meets Bridie, who gives her soup and no-nonsense wisdom; Donal, an elderly Labrador with excellent judgment; and Ciar n, a quiet marine researcher who navigates by the sound of water and shows her the sea from the inside.
This is a book for anyone who has ever looked at their perfectly managed life and felt, quietly, that something was missing. It is a book about permission: to rest, to write, to want more, to come home to yourself.
Perfect for readers of Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly, and Hazel Gaynor.