Eternal providers of wisdom and chicken soup, most of them presumably took an incredibly invested interest in your love life, too.

Hannah Orenstein was inspired by her Florida-based grandparents, Rose and Fred, to write her fourth novel, Meant to Be Mine (Atria Books).

Centred around grandma Gloria, who has accurately predicted the day each member of the family met their match, 29-year-old Edie now knows the date she is scheduled to meet her future partner — and Hannah used examples from her own grandparents to colour the book.

“My grandparents were really close and they were just such wonderful people,” Hannah told me.

“I always thought about how special and rare it was to have grandparents well into adulthood.

“When I was writing, grandma, in particular, inspired the character of Gloria because she just leapt into my head and I could hear her voice so clearly.

“She was such a vivid person and, while I was writing, I sort of concocted this idea of her having this ability to predict the date that people are going to meet the love of their life.”

And similar to many of Hannah’s creative peers, it was the outbreak of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns that acted as a springboard for the novel’s formation.

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