Three years after her partners death, Geraldine Brooks booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.
Will surely join the other classics delivered to new widows by their literary friends. In significant ways, it’s more useful and inspiring than some of the others.
Intensely intimate and candid ... Brooks frames her book in two separate narratives; each amplifies the potency of the other ... Brooks captures the striking coincidences that marked his death with a poignancy tempered by her keen ability as a storyteller ... Unlike others, this memoir, delicately written but without any precious patter, frames itself as a book of days. Overwrought metaphors aside, grief is less of an ocean and more of a series of days ... A book that is meant to be read slowly.
Brooks is careful to calibrate her grief against larger-scale disasters ... The opposite of padded. If anything, it’s a little overlean and eked-out, 200-odd pages aired by paragraph breaks. Brooks seems brittle still, but writing is her way through, and now her solo livelihood.
