THE SPACE BETWEEN

Some losses change everything. Suicide loss changes who you are. When Annette Matov's younger sister Natalie died by suicide at twenty-three, she lost more than a sister. She lost the future she had hoped for, the family she had fought to hold together, and the certainty she had carried as a trained social worker that she would recognise the signs in time. She didn't. The Space Between is a memoir of two sisters, separated by six years and a lifetime of complexity. It is the story of a family shaped by instability, mental illness, faith, and an enormous, complicated love - and of what remains when the worst thing you have ever imagined actually happens. Written from the intersecting perspectives of a grieving sister, a devoted daughter, a loving aunty, and an experienced social worker, this book does not offer easy comfort or clinical distance. It offers something rarer and more sustaining - the truth of what it is to love someone through darkness, to lose them anyway, and to find a way to keep living in the aftermath. Honest. Raw. Deeply human. The Space Between is for everyone who has ever loved someone they couldn't save. For the bereaved navigating a grief that defies explanation. For the professionals who understand the language of mental health but have had to learn, painfully, that knowledge is not armour. And for anyone who has stood in the impossible space between hoping and letting go - and had to find a way to keep going. You are not alone in the space between. And there is still light on the other side of it. Annette Matov is a social worker with over a decade of experience supporting individuals and families through crisis, trauma, and loss. The Space Between is her first book.