THE LEAVING YEAR

Nobody warns you that the hardest part of your last year of school isn't the exams.

It's September, when everyone starts asking what you're doing next year and you answer in a corridor to end an awkward pause. It's the flat week in January when nothing is happening and you have stopped, quietly, and nobody has noticed including you. It's February, when the group starts coming apart politely. It's the last day, when you expected a feeling and got an afternoon.

The Leaving Year goes through those ten months in the order they actually arrive - September to June, then the summer, then the first week of whatever comes next. Not a collection of nice thoughts you can read in any order. A book that starts somewhere and takes you somewhere, one month at a time, the way the year is built.

Every month chapter gives you the same five things: what actually happens, the one trap that catches most people, the exact sentences to say out loud, two or three things to do that are small enough to finish, and one line to carry forward. By June you have ten of those lines, collected in one chapter, and you can see the shape of a year you got through.

Inside:

- Ten month-by-month chapters, September through June, in order

- The two sentences that answer "so what are you doing next year?" without committing you to anything

- A twelve-week revision plan built to survive a bad Wednesday, not an ideal Sunday

- Nine kinds of bad day, and what each one actually needs - because generic advice is aimed at an average bad day nobody has ever had

- Every sentence in the book collected in one chapter, sorted by who you're talking to

- What to do when a paper goes badly, when the rejection arrives, when a friend goes quiet, when home is hard

- Thirty things that are true in June and impossible to believe in September

- A chapter called If This Year Went Badly, which does not tell you everything happens for a reason

- A short note for the adult who gave you the book

Written for readers of about fifteen and up, in their final year of school or the year before it. No statistics, no studies, no research says. No lectures about your phone, your bedroom or your attitude. No adult pretending to have got it right first time.

This is not therapy and it doesn't pretend to be. It says so, out loud, more than once, and it keeps telling you to find one adult you can talk to before the emergency - with a page at the back on exactly how to start that conversation when you can't find your own words.