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  • Published: 23 September 2021
  • ISBN: 9781844885893
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

Openhearted

Eighty Years of Love, Loss, Laughter and Letting Go




A refreshingly frank, engaging and uplifting memoir of resilience, hope and love

At 20 Londoner Ann Ingle fell madly in love with an Irish fellow she met on holiday in Cornwall. At the church to arrange their shotgun wedding she discovered that he hadn't even told her his real name.

Sixty-odd years later Ann looks back and considers what she has learned from the life that followed - bringing eight children into the world, their father's years of mental illness and tragic death at 40, being a cash-strapped single mother in 1980s Dublin, coming into her own in her middle years - going to college, working and writing, and continuing to evolve and learn into her ninth decade, even as she accepts the realities of being 'old'.

Candid about everything that matters - love, sex, heartbreak, money, class, religion, mental health, rearing children (and letting them go), reading and writing, ageing - Openhearted is a compelling story about living life in a spirit of curiosity and delight and with a willingness to look for good in others.

  • Published: 23 September 2021
  • ISBN: 9781844885893
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

Praise for Openhearted

Lifted my spirits beyond description! So loving and non-judgemental and Ann Ingle's enjoyment of life is beautiful to behold. Genuinely inspirational. I LOVE ANN INGLE

Marian Keyes

Heart-breaking yet funny, and jaw-droppingly honest . . . by some distance, the most courageous, most poignant, most life-affirming memoir I've read in the last twenty years and more

Paul Howard

Incredibly poignant and so compelling, honest, warm and unique - I love this!

Nina Stibbe

Profoundly honest . . . I relish its kindness, its humour and its courage

Frank McGuinness

A breathtakingly honest account of marriage, motherhood and widowhood . . . extremely moving and hugely inspiring

Kathleen Mac Mahon

Those who read openhearted will experience the warm glow of Ann Ingle's company - you are lucky

Niall Breslin

Really beautiful. Searingly honest, astonishingly frank and very, very funny

Maia Dunphy

What a beautiful openhearted, at times broken-hearted memoir . . . honest, funny, searingly direct, a wonderful voice . . . remarkable

Joe Duffy

I loved it, really loved it . . . a very uplifting, hopeful book . . . brilliant

Ray D'Arcy

A beautiful book

Irish Times

Wise and funny and thoughtful

Rosita Boland

Openhearted . . . is a reminder of how much times have changed and this should appeal to all readers, of every vintage, young and old

Irish Independent

Extraordinary . . . a story of survival in the face of extraordinary hardship, but also a love story - and one that betrays not an ounce of mawkishness or self-pity

The Gloss