This is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love. WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION AWARD 2025.
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he’d been a healthy and happy man; he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.
Sarah Perry is the internationally best selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstone’s Book of the Year Awards and the British Book Awards, and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award.
In conversation with Nicola Upson
