Between Yesterday and Tomorrow by Luan Goldie: A Story About Grief, Loss and Finding Your Way Back

I remember when I went back home after the war in Ukraine, via Hungary. I had been away for a while, and whenever I returned home, I was usually quite happy to stay upstairs by myself and enjoy my own little space. I had only one of my close friends living in the same city, and I was not really the type to spend much time downstairs. But there was this young boy who was very fond of one of my sisters. My sister loves children and she has always been the type of person who welcomes people into her space, so this boy would often come around. I remember looking at him and knowing that something wasn't right with his health. Sometimes, when he didn't show up for a while, my sister would get a call saying that he was very sick, and she would go to visit him. He was young, and he was particularly attached to my sister. They would sit together, talk and just spend time with each other. 

One day I came downstairs and found my sister talking to his mother. I sat down with them, and the conversation made me sad. His mother was talking about how difficult things had become at home. She was trying to feed the children and care for a child living with sickle cell disease, while also dealing with a husband who, from what she told us, was not giving her the support she needed and was unfaithful. I remember thinking about something my father had always said to me: that you should understand important health considerations before having children. I had already thought deeply about these things even before I graduated from medical school, and having that knowledge was all I needed.

What people sometimes don't understand is that living with sickle cell disease can bring enormous challenges, not only for the person living with it but also for the family caring for them. It can mean hospital visits, pain, fear, financial pressure, emotional exhaustion and watching someone you love struggle with something you cannot simply take away from them. And for some families, there is also the terrible reality of losing that person. That young boy eventually died. My sister called me this year to tell me. He never made it to university. I thought about his mother, who had spent years trying to keep going while watching her son suffer, and I wondered about all the things she must have carried that nobody else could see. That kind of loss doesn't simply disappear because life continues around you.

That was one of the reasons I found myself thinking about grief while reading Between Yesterday and Tomorrow by Luan Goldie. The novel follows Zoe, who returns to work after experiencing a devastating loss and realises that everyone around her seems to be waiting for the old Zoe to return. The problem is that she doesn't know how to become that person again because loss has changed her. Then she meets Cian, a colleague recovering at home after a climbing accident has temporarily left him unable to move around normally. Their relationship begins with friendship, conversation and moments of vulnerability before gradually developing into something deeper.

What I appreciated most about the book is that grief isn't treated as something that simply happens and then ends. Zoe is still trying to work out who she is after her loss. She has people around her who care about her, but having people who love you doesn't automatically tell you how to heal. Sometimes people want you to be yourself again before you have even figured out who this new version of yourself is. That felt very real to me. The book also has humour, which I think is important because grief is not sadness every second of every day. People still laugh. They still have silly conversations. They still fall in love, get annoyed, make mistakes, eat, work and try to carry on. There can be a completely ordinary moment in the middle of something painful, and that doesn't make the grief any less real. Goldie's story seems interested in that messy space between what happened yesterday and the possibility of tomorrow, which is really where Zoe finds herself.

I also liked that the book doesn't make healing look perfectly neat. Zoe keeps people at a distance, while Cian is dealing with his own frustrations and uncertainty. Their connection gives them somewhere to be honest, but it doesn't magically erase everything they have been through. That is probably what I took from the story most. Sometimes another person cannot fix what has happened to you, but their presence can remind you that there is still a life waiting for you. The book is ultimately about courage, connection and the possibility of rebuilding when something inside you feels broken.

For me, reading it alongside the memory of that young boy made the subject of grief feel particularly personal. His story was very different from Zoe's, and I don't want to pretend they are the same thing. Zoe is grieving the death of someone close to her, while the boy I remember was someone I watched from the outside, a child my sister cared deeply about. But grief has a way of making us think about all the people who have left us and all the lives that might have looked completely different if circumstances had been kinder. His mother had hoped to see her son grow up. He should have had the chance to go to university, make friends, fall in love, find work and discover the person he was going to become. Instead, his life ended before he reached those things. I think that is one of the hardest parts of losing someone young: you don't only grieve the person they were. You grieve everything they never got to become.

It reminded me that grief doesn't have one timetable and that moving forward doesn't mean leaving someone behind. Sometimes moving forward simply means learning how to carry what happened while allowing yourself to experience something meaningful again. I learned these lessons after losing my sister. There is sadness in this book, but there is also friendship, humour, affection and hope, and I think that balance is what makes it worth reading. Luan Goldie has written a story about people who are wounded but not finished, and I liked that distinction. You can be changed by what happened to you without allowing it to become the only thing that defines you. And perhaps that is what lies between yesterday and tomorrow: not forgetting what happened, but slowly becoming brave enough to live again.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow by Luan Goldie was published in the UK on 30 July 2026 by Juniper, an imprint of HarperCollins, and is 384 pages.

It would make a good movie. What do you think?