Some losses don’t just break you—they take you apart, piece by piece, until you are no longer the person you once were. On July 7, 2005, Azuma Wundowa’s life crumbled when her mother boarded a bus in London and never came home.

That summer, at sixteen, Azuma was gleefully waiting for concert tickets to arrive and enjoying life as it was. But then her mother went missing amidst one of the most devastating tragedies in London—the 7/7 bombings. It didn’t make any sense: one day, she was making tea with her mother in their kitchen; the next, she was staring out the window, waiting for someone who would never return.

When her father uttered the piercing words, “The police have come to say they found mummy. She is dead.” her world disintegrated. Her mother, the very definition of strength, was among the 52 victims of the bombings, one of those on bus 30.

The Dressmaker’s Daughter takes you through the rawness and aftermath of grief and loss. From subsequently losing her home and a challenged relationship with her father to waking up years later from a vivid dream of taking her mother to a spa—only to be gut-punched by reality—Azuma captures the jagged edges of life when the world stops for you but continues for everyone else.

This book is about how trauma lingers in the mundane—how a simple Mother’s Day card in a store can cut like a knife—and, most importantly, how you can find your own version of healing, even when it feels like nothing but a distant wish.