No Such Thing As Monday

'A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.' Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

From Booker Prize-longlisted author Sian Hughes comes a fierce, tender and unexpectedly funny novel about memory, guilt, and reinvention.

‘Imagine someone suddenly starts saying Tuesday comes straight after Sunday. You learn not to mention Monday. Monday is not a thing in your house. At school you might write Monday on your page, but you’d never make that mistake at home.’

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside. Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self destruction, defiance, and shame.

When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her.

Raw, exhilarating, funny and full of heart, No Such Thing As Monday confirms Sian Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

About the Author

Sian Hughes lives in rural Cheshire and is a Royal Literary Fund Writing Tutor based at the University of Liverpool. Her first collection of poetry, The Missing (Salt, 2009), was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the Seamus Heaney Award, among other accolades.

Her first novel, Pearl, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2024. It has been published in many languages worldwide. No Such Thing As Monday is her second novel.