Seventeen year-old Lenni Pettersson has been told she’s terminal, or as she explains, they’ve started calling it a “life-limiting” condition. In a bid to fill the remainder of her days at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital she joins an art therapy class where she meets eighty-three year-old Margot. As their unlikely friendship develops, Lenni and Margot realize that between them they have lived for 100 years.  Though their days are dwindling, they are determined to leave something everlasting behind so they decide to make one hundred paintings showcasing their one hundred years.

In the vein of John Green, Rachel Joyce, and Jojo Moyes, The One Hundred Years of Lenny & Margot (Harper Perennial/$17.00/June 1, 2021) is a sensational debut from Marianne Cronin. Delightfully funny, bittersweet, and at times heart-breaking, Cronin’s unforgettable characters are familiar yet wholly unique. Lenni is a young woman with a tough outer shell and quick wit eager to live a fun life even if it’s within hospital walls, and Margot is a purple pajama wearing, fruitcake-eating rebel with a complicated past. The duo’s artistic endeavor is aided by Lenni’s doting cherry-colored hair palliative care nurse, and Father Arthur, the hospital’s patient chaplain.

With each image Lenni and Margot create they share with each other the backstories behind them—the tales of love and loss, of courage and kindness, and unexpected tenderness and pure joy. As their stories catch up to the present and the 100 paintings are nearly complete, the depths of Lenni’s strength becomes even more apparent, and Margot wonders is it’s not too late to change missed opportunities of the past.  The extraordinary bond between them shows the power of living each day to the fullest and offers a tribute to the stories that are lived all around us.

The character of Lenni came to Marianne Cronin while she was working on an essay for her master’s degree in Literary Linguistics. She immediately abandoned her work, as any good student would she says, and began writing what would become this book. Cronin was born in 1990 and grew up in Warwickshire, England. She studied English at Lancaster University before earning a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. She now spends most of her time writing, with her newly-adopted rescue cat sleeping under her desk. When she’s not writing, she can be found performing improv in the West Midlands, where she now lives. The One Hundred Years of Lenny & Margot, is to be translated into over 20 languages and is being adapted into a feature film by a major Hollywood studio.

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