A powerful, timely and incredibly moving memoir in the bestselling tradition of Blake Morrison, Joan Didion and Ruth Picardie.
Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, grew up in Yorkshire and lives in London.
Beautiful, devastating and ultimately uplifting, intimate and
universal all at once . . . Cathy Rentzenbrink has found a way to
express the things that all of us wrestle with at times - knowing
how to live and taking the risk to love; facing what has damaged
us, and owning it as much as a person can.
*Jessie Burton, bestselling author of The Miniaturist*
Profoundly moving . . . The book's real power lies in
Rentzenbrink's skill as a writer, her ability to unearth precise
and agonising details quietly, with no self-pity or drama . . . it
falls into a tradition of beautifully written accounts of grief,
such as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking . . .
Rentzenbrink offers a message of enormous hope for anybody who is
going through loss, grief or trauma . . . She emerges from this
unflinching memoir with dignity, strength and an enormous heart
*Sunday Times*
Devastatingly honest and heartbreakingly raw, The Last Act of Love
is not simply a book about grief or love or a family's unstinting
hope to do the best for their son and brother. It's a book about
courage. About the courage to face reality even at its most bleak.
And for all the book's sadness it is, ultimately, a book about
hope: about how even the darkest tunnels have a glimmer of light
beckoning you at the other end. I defy anyone not to be moved by
this remarkable and brave story.
*Hannah Beckerman, author of The Dead Wife's Handbook*
This is a brilliant book. Harrowing and heartbreaking, but also
warm and human and healing. It is about a rare kind of tragedy, but
feels universal, as it is about love and loss and how we learn to
live, in the face of what life throws at us. You may well cry, but
you will feel better for having read it, which you absolutely must.
A triumph of love.
*Matt Haig, author of Reasons To Stay Alive*
Brilliant. Moving, warm, agonising, unputdownable. One of the best
memoirs I've read.
*Sophie Hannah, author of The Carrier*
This is a touching and brave book, heartbreaking yet beautiful.
*S J Watson*
This lovely, tender, painful book speaks for anyone who has
suffered loss, on a scale from minor to cataclysmic . . . which
pretty well means us all.
*Deborah Moggach, author of the Best Exotic Marigold
Hotel*
Extraordinary . . . An honest, heartbreaking, uplifting account of
family tragedy. Read it.
*Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You*
I never knew a story of grief could have so much joy in it.
*Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina*
This is not only an unflinching and powerfully told account of an
unimaginably painful family tragedy. It is also an unforgettable
meditation on a close sibling relationship, on growing up with
grief, on life, love and everything in between. I am in awe of how
Cathy has managed to write so bravely and beautifully of something
so devastating, and forge such a positive affirmation of familial
love from such desperately bleak circumstances.
*The Bookseller*
There are only two ways that this book will be read: devoured in
the middle of the night in one sitting, or eked out, only a few
pages a day, because the feelings it prompts are simply too
intense. Either way, it will both stick with you and have you
grabbing the forearm of whoever asks you what to read next
intensely, so they know how great this is . . . a gobsmacking
memoir about family and love. Truly, it will inspire you to be your
very best self for a long time after the final page.
*The Debrief*
Profoundly moving . . . It is a great achievement to transform such
a terrible story - one of a kind with which, as a neurosurgeon, I
am painfully familiar - into something rather beautiful and
uplifting . . .This book should be read by everybody who has either
personal or professional experience of severe head injury and,
indeed, by anybody who is concerned by the way our society has such
difficulty in accepting that meaningful life is about more than
just a beating heart.
*New Statesman*
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