Notes on Grief, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (hardback May 2021)
£10.00
A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. 'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger.You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language' On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father.
Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.
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A Life on Our Planet : My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future, David Attenborough ( paperback May 2022)
£12.99
With a new afterword, Why You Are Here: A speech on the opening of the COP26 climate summit.As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity. I have been witness to this decline.A Life on Our Planet contains my witness statement, and my vision for the future - the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right. We have the opportunity to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited. All we need is the will do so.
All The Living and The Dead, Hayley Campbell ( paperback Feb 2023)
£8.99
All the Living and the Dead : An Exploration of the People Who Make Death Their Life's Work
In this profoundly moving and remarkable book, journalist Hayley Campbell explores society's attitudes towards death, and the impact on those who work with it every day. 'If the reason we're outsourcing this burden is because it's too much for us,' she asks, 'how do they deal with it?' Would facing death directly make us fear it less?Inspired by her own childhood fascination with the subject, she meets embalmers and a former death row executioner, mass fatality investigators and a bereavement midwife.
She talks to gravediggers who have already dug their own graves and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with people who see death every day, she asks: Does seeing death change you as a person? And are we all missing something vital by letting death remain hidden?
Cacophony of Bone, Kerri Ni Dochartaigh (paperback Jan 2024)
£10.99
Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes.The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked.
For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year - a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life - from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world - and it is about all that does not change.
All that which simply keeps on - living and breathing, nesting and dying - in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean.
Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.
Cheri, Jo Ann Beard (hardback novella August 2023)
£10.00
Cheri has been living with cancer for many years. Now, she is dying. As she navigates the final weeks of her life, and takes charge of the manner of her death, she is flooded with childhood memories, and returns to the present with a renewed appreciation for the brilliance of life around her: the autumn has never been so beautiful, her daughters never as radiant.
Brave, incredibly strong and deeply loved, Cheri makes one last nerve-wracking journey across the country with her girls and her friends, knowing relief waits welcoming as a frozen lake on the other side. A masterpiece of fiction and memory.
For those who like Claire Keegan - sparse, emotional prose and well worth the read.
