Aoife Lyall’s The Day Before beautifully captures the ordinary moments in life that crystallise in the face of crisis and threat. Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, these intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door. Tender, challenging, and historically significant, The Day Before asks what it means when home is the one place you cannot leave, and the one place you cannot go. The Day Before is Aoife Lyall’s second collection, following her widely praised debut, Mother, Nature, which was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards in 2021.

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Aoife Lyall’s debut, Mother, Nature, explores pregnancy, loss, motherhood, hospitals and grief in moving lyric poems that amount to an extended sequence – the thematic resonance of the collection is detailed, and shows a thoroughness in its consideration of small moments of private grief... One of Lyall's most effective techniques is the exploration of paradox, the volta-like turning of the lyric and its imagery, which makes the best poems here particularly devastating in their contained forms.

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Mother, Nature by Aoife Lyall was an incredibly powerful book. It was extremely moving to read it. I came to this not really knowing quite what to expect, but I found myself blown away by the visceral nature of the writing. It's an extremely moving and at times deeply upsetting book in the way it treats its subject matter, which deals with loss, remembrance, regret and grief. These are all extremely powerful themes and I think that Aoife presents them in a way that is both powerful, but also accessible.