'Shelf Life is whip-smart, slyly heartbreaking, and I felt the truth of it in my bones.' Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

Ruth is thirty years old. She works as a nurse in a care home and her fiancé has just broken up with her. The only thing she has left of him is their shopping list for the upcoming week.

Starting with six eggs, and working through spaghetti and strawberries, apples and tea bags, this inventive novel builds a picture of a woman defined by the people she serves; her patients, her friends, and, most of all, her partner of ten years. Without him, Ruth needs to find out - with conditioner and single cream and a lot of sugar - who she is when she stands alone.

With her fresh unpredictable style, Franchini skewers modern relationships and toxic masculinity, moving effortlessly between humour and heartbreak to tell the story of a woman rebuilding herself on her own terms.

Livia Franchini is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy, whose short stories have been published in numerous anthologies. Livia is also an inaugural writer-in-residence for the Connecting Emerging Literary Artist project. She lives in London and is completing a PhD in experimental women¿s writing at Goldsmiths University.