Mourning
Bittersweet memories: Ti Amo, by Hanne Ørstavik, reviewed
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…
A lost brother: My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, by Paul Stanbridge, reviewed
Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…
Sister, where are you? – Clover Stroud mourns her beloved sibling
‘CERTIFICATE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF IDENTITY,’ the freshly issued death certificate read. In the craziness and shock of grief for…
Mourning sickness: our conspiracy of silence over grief
Why are we so scared of other people’s grief?
The art of mourning well
Malindi, Kenya I’ve learned that mourning must be tackled ever so gently. As a younger man, when friends were killed…
From blue to pink: Looking for Eliza, by Leaf Arbuthnot, reviewed
On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
Julie Myerson captures the sorrow that surpasses all understanding
As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss…
Mrs Badgery
Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs Badgery’, rarely seen since its first publication in Dickens’s Household Words magazine in September 1857, is an…
Why I love undertakers
By looking after the dead, funeral directors allow the living to love and mourn them
