“A book that clearly had to be written . . . to be read by anyone who ever pauses to consider our mortality.” —Sunday Telegraph
“Mesmerizing, harrowing, and radiant . . . impossible to put it down.” —Daily Mail (UK)
“Unflinching yet uplifting . . . [Coutts is] a chronicler of what it means to be human.” —Financial Times
“A fierce love letter-cum-elegy . . . This is far more than just another book about grief.” —Marina Warner, Observer
“Marion Coutts’ account of living with her husband’s illness and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed. Reading it, you have the sense of something truly unique being brought into the world—it stays with you for a long time after.” —Bill Bryson (Wellcome Prize citation)
“The writing is lyrical, textured, perfectly paced; the sentences short so that we feel Coutts’s moments of panic, her quickened heartbeat . . . [A] startlingly beautiful and inspiring pioneer text.” —Independent
“An extraordinary vigil of a book, a work of art.” —Observer
“[Coutts] chooses her words with such beautiful scrupulousness, never twisting or turning the knife of her story to exact our pity or admiration; her thought is like sensation, her descriptions of feeling are often like notes for a visual work . . . Her book is a homage to an exceptional man; it’s also the work of an exceptional woman artist.” —Guardian
“Extraordinary . . . Not quite like any other bereavement memoir.” —Evening Standard
“Searing, shocking, unflinching, profoundly moving.” —Spectator
Black Cat
