Roar. Cecelia Ahern

      

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

      Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2018

      Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008283490

      Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008283513

      Version: 2019-04-15

       Dedication

       For all the women who …

       Epigraph

      I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.

       Helen Reddy and Ray Burton

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      1. The Woman Who Slowly Disappeared

      2. The Woman Who Was Kept on the Shelf

3. The Woman Who Grew Wings

4. The Woman Who Was Fed by a Duck

5. The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin

6. The Woman Who Thought Her Mirror Was Broken

       7. The Woman Who Was Swallowed Up by the Floor and Who Met Lots of Other Women Down There Too

       8. The Woman Who Ordered the Seabass Special

       9. The Woman Who Ate Photographs

       10. The Woman Who Forgot Her Name

       11. The Woman Who Had a Ticking Clock

       12. The Woman Who Sowed Seeds of Doubt

       13. The Woman Who Returned and Exchanged Her Husband

       14. The Woman Who Lost Her Common Sense

       15. The Woman Who Walked in Her Husband’s Shoes

       16. The Woman Who Was a Featherbrain

       17. The Woman Who Wore Her Heart on Her Sleeve

       18. The Woman Who Wore Pink

       19. The Woman Who Blew Away

       20. The Woman Who Had a Strong Suit

       21. The Woman Who Spoke Woman

       22. The Woman Who Found the World in Her Oyster

       23. The Woman Who Guarded Gonads

       24. The Woman Who Was Pigeonholed

       25. The Woman Who Jumped on the Bandwagon

       26. The Woman Who Smiled

       27. The Woman Who Thought the Grass Was Greener on the Other Side

       28. The Woman Who Unravelled

       29. The Woman Who Cherry-Picked

       30. The Woman Who Roared

       Keep Reading …

       About the Author

       Also by Cecelia Ahern

       About the Publisher

      

      1

      There’s a gentle knock on the door before it opens. Nurse Rada steps inside and closes the door behind her.

      ‘I’m here,’ the woman says, quietly.

      Rada scans the room, following the sound of her voice.

      ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,’ the woman repeats softly, until Rada stops searching.

      Her eye level is too high and it’s focused too much to the left, more in line with the bird poo on the window that has eroded over the past three days with the rain.

      The woman sighs gently from her seat on the window ledge that overlooks the college campus. She entered this university hospital feeling so hopeful that she could be healed, but instead, after six months, she feels like a lab rat, poked and prodded at by scientists and doctors in increasingly desperate efforts to understand her condition.

      She has been diagnosed with a rare complex genetic disorder that causes the chromosomes in her body to fade away. They are not self-destructing or breaking down, they are not even mutating – her organ functions all appear perfectly normal; all tests indicate that everything is fine and healthy. To put it simply, she’s disappearing, but she’s still here.

      Her disappearing was gradual at first. Barely noticeable. There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I didn’t see you there,’ a lot of misjudging her edges, bumping against her shoulders, stepping on her toes, but it didn’t ring any alarm bells. Not at first.

      She faded in equal measure. It wasn’t a missing hand or a missing toe or suddenly a missing ear, it was a gradual equal fade; she diminished. She became a shimmer, like a heat haze on a highway. She