Any Ordinary Day

Most of us assume the worst will not happen to us — and then, for some, an utterly ordinary day becomes the day everything changes. In Any Ordinary Day, the Australian journalist and news anchor Leigh Sales sets out to understand how people survive sudden, life-altering catastrophe: the phone call, the knock at the door, the accident or diagnosis that divides a life into before and after.

Drawing on her years of interviewing people on the worst day of their lives, Sales sits down with survivors of some of Australia's most public tragedies, as well as with experts in grief, trauma, medicine, and probability. She weaves their testimony together with candid reflection on her own fears and a health scare of her own, asking how the human mind copes with shock, why we are so bad at assessing risk, and where resilience actually comes from.

Compassionate, curious, and clear-eyed, Any Ordinary Day is a work of narrative non-fiction that treats its subjects with unusual tenderness. Rather than offering easy reassurance, it looks directly at loss and finds, in the people who have endured it, a quietly hopeful account of how life goes on.