About the book

In a refuge in the north of England, a support worker called Jean used to read the letters that abusive men sent their partners after they had managed to get away. She would wave the letter in the air, laugh, and say: "That one is straight out of the dickhead's handbook."

Jean said it for years. The letters were always the same. The declarations of love. The apologies that were not really apologies. The threats that came three lines later. The same tactics, the same sentences, delivered by men who believed they were being original.

This book is the survivor's handbook that sits alongside the one Jean told us abusers were reading from. Twenty-six tactics, each given two chapters: one in a sharp satirical voice that exposes the playbook, one in a warm survivor-to-survivor voice that names what it does to you and helps you work out what to do next.

About the author

Nina Farrow is a pseudonym. The author works in the domestic abuse sector, including direct work with perpetrators on behaviour change programmes. She is also a survivor. The pseudonym exists because a book under her real name would make the therapeutic work impossible, and the therapeutic work is one of the few things that reliably reduces reoffending.

The book is coming soon. The newsletter is where the writing happens in public.