Turn Back Time

De: Eleanor Tucker

Beauty journalist, and 40-something year old woman, Erica Pells, is tired of feeling invisible and disappearing behind her nematode wrinkles. She’s over the ‘pro-ageing’ articles she is exclusively asked to write (apart from the punny headlines that no one appreciates.) Frankly, she's over most things; getting older, heavy contouring, boring old Wiltshire and her exasperating Mum (who clearly prefers her prodigal brother, Simon).

So when her former editor, Merlyn, gives her the opportunity to try a revolutionary hi-tech beauty treatment called WULT (Woke Up Like This), that promises to make you look 20 years younger, she jumps at the chance. What has she got to lose, anyway?

At first, she is hooked. Here again is her 20 something skin, her ability to stand out in the crowd, and she can finally get one over her beauty rival, influencer Cassia Carver. Crucially, it is a promise of another ’shot’ at a new (Gen-Z) life. The only catch, no one recognises her. Her friends think she’s not just mad, but pity her, and the handsome cheese-loving Gabe, doesn’t seem quite as excited at the prospect of a nubile young girlfriend as she had thought.

When her ailing mother is taken to hospital and doesn’t recognise her, she starts to realise that maybe being young wasn’t everything she glamourised it to be. WOKE UP LIKE THIS tells the hilarious story of a middle-aged woman who goes back to find her youth, and discovers it wasn’t where she left it at all.

©2026 Eleanor Tucker (P)2026 W.F. Howes Ltd.