** PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST 2025 **

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child – from the bestselling memoirist of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

‘Truly extraordinary’ HELEN MACDONALD

‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss – surviving life’
NEW YORK TIMES

It’s midsummer 2018, and Alexandra Fuller is about to turn fifty, but feels like her life is coming apart. She vows to get herself back on an even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.

No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, her home country of Zimbabwe – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters. From a sheep waggon in the mountains of Wyoming to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, she embarks on a journey up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains, trying to find out how to grieve herself whole.

‘For anyone who’s ever loved and lost, or ever will; in short, a book for us all’ OPRAH DAILY

‘A profound and gripping memoir’ SUNDAY TIMES

* A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST AND TIME *

A truly extraordinary memoir about a mother’s loss of her son: beautiful, fearless, raw and an utterly compelling read -- Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain inflicted by “the sharp knife of a short life” * Guardian *
A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss * Sunday Times *

Alexandra Fuller is the author of four memoirs, including Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight – a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-Fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize – and the New York Times-bestselling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, two books of non-fiction, and the novel Quiet Until the Thaw. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times.