It’s that time of the year again, when we look back on the publishing year and we are over the moon that Rebecca Wait‘s astute and witty novel I’m Sorry You Feel That Way was included in The Times round-up of the 26 best fiction books of 2022 and in the Guardian’s round-up of best fiction of 2022. Good Housekeeping also included the title in their end of year round-up, saying it ‘hits that sweet spot between poignancy and humour.’

The Times described it as ‘snarky and mischievous… gently serious and touching’ while The Guardian called it ‘a very funny, emotionally wise story of sibling rivalry and difficult mothers.’

I’m Sorry You Feel That Way was published by Riverrun in hardcover in July 2022.  You can find a selection of some of the other brilliant reviews it has received since publication below:

‘Funny, tender and sad’ Sunday Express

‘If you liked Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, you’ll love this novel’ Good Housekeeping

‘One of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I’ve read’ the i newspaper

‘Shades of Fleabag in this smart, funny drama’ Mail on Sunday

‘An enjoyably bittersweet novel about a dysfunctional modern family’ Independent

‘Razor-sharp ‘ Observer

‘One of the funniest novels you’ll read this year’ Guardian

For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is also their older brother Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with.

There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything . . .

As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they’d intended. They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down. And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.