The Red of my Blood: A Death and Life Story

Description

A Sunday Times bestseller and a Times and Independent 'must read'- a raw and penetrating memoir from this critically acclaimed author about surviving the loss of her sister and embracing death as an essential, and enriching, part of life. THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'She is a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life's horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on.' SPECTATOR 'With brutal, beautiful honesty, Clover articulates how bereavement shocks and dislocates - and in all the pain, there's SO much life.' MARIAN KEYES ............................................... 'Can death bring something good to my life?' A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human. 'A beautiful addition to the literature of loss. It will serve as a lit match, to be passed from one person to the next in the darkest moments.' THE SUNDAY TIMES

Clover Stroud is a writer and journalist, writing regularly for the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph, among others. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild & Sleepless Nights- A Mother's Story was rated one of the 'best books of the year, 2020' by the Observer and the Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and was a Sunday Times bestseller. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and five children.

A beautiful book. I loved every word. -- Fearne Cotton * Happy Place Podcast * Stroud's beautiful new memoir, The Red of My Blood, is studded with agonising moments ... This is a colourful blast of feeling that picks up on the hallucinogenic oddness of grief, along with the importance of honouring death as an unavoidable part of life. -- Gwendolyn Smith * i newspaper * Like a magician, she puts her grief into a hat and pulls out 70,000 perfect words to describe what it is like when language fails you. Courageous and utterly compelling, this is a book that will wring you out, wear you down and leave you filled with wonder. -- Francis Wilson * The Oldie * Clover writes with visceral honesty about the lived experience of her grief for her sister Nell - in all its hues; moving swiftly between darkness and light whilst her love for Nell remains powerfully alive and present. -- Julia Samuel The Red of my Blood is one of the most haunting, gripping books I've read in recent memory. Stroud's writing about overwhelming loss is knife-sharp, beautiful, and profound. This is a masterful memoir, which will echo with its readers for a long time. -- Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles and Circe