Thank you for submitting The Worst Week of the Year to Brindle & Hoxham. We received your manuscript at last night's editorial meeting and have given it the careful attention this house reserves for unsolicited despair.

Our committee was, as ever, divided. Several readers found the prose admirably free of fun. Others wished the rejections had been treated as evidence rather than ornament. One reader, recently returned from leave, simply requested that we close the window. We pass these notes along not to wound, but to be useful.

We must, with regret, decline the manuscript. Our list is full for this season and the next, and your subject — a week in which, by the author's own account, things conspired to go wrong — sits awkwardly between memoir and elegy. We would, however, be most grateful to read future work, particularly from a week in which fewer things did.

A small note on plausibility. The central premise depends upon the author having, in fact, failed. We were unable to verify this in the manuscript. The reader is given, by page three: a Times Book of the Year, a Hachette imprint, an agent at Soho, bylines at the NYT, the FT, and the Guardian, and a flat in Estrela. Further enquiries surfaced a thriving mint plant, a circle of friends with what can only be described as embarrassing affection for the author, and a documented warming effect on any room she enters. The case for failure, as presented, did not hold.

We do, of course, encourage you to continue submitting. The most celebrated authors on our list have faced many such letters as this one. We trust you will not be deterred by a single — or, indeed, fifteenth — rejection.