Fi
A Memoir of My Son
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:11th Jul '24
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 11th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career-defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child
'Truly extraordinary'
HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk
‘A mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMES
It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on 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, a home country – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers – in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.
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
Fuller is a sublime writer. In the hands of another memoirist, the story of Fi might be unbearably sad, but this book is a mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss - surviving life * New York Times *
A devastating, profoundly moving and uplifting memoir – as told by a brave, wonderful mother who found herself ultimately able to withstand the most terrible of tests -- Ben Goldsmith, author of God Is An Octopus
Incandescent, burning with both grief and life, a book so hot it melts the gold to mend the cracks of a smashed psyche in a brilliant act of literary kintsugi -- Jay Griffiths, author of Wild
An astonishing memoir. Written in a rush of grief, it is full of beauty and pain: sensual and corporeal, spiritual and philosophical, and utterly human. Anyone who knows grief will learn something new here. I will never forget this book -- Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father
A gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read. Toward the end of the memoir, Fuller quotes Franz Kafka: ‘A book must be an axe to the frozen sea inside us.’ This book is a sharp ax. By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened * Washington Post *
In the wake of immense loss, what remains? With clear, luminous prose and courageous insight, Fuller investigates... The writing is so stunning, immediate, and heartfelt that the book is often as difficult to read as it is to put down. A true marvel of a memoir, simultaneously beautiful and devastating * Kirkus, *Starred Review* *
Fuller's prose is raw, primal and electric, pulling the reader into both her shock and her attempts to carry on with a heart cleaved in two. Readers who are experiencing their own grief will find solace here, while those who've been following Fuller for years through her beautifully written memoirs will want to be with her as she recounts this tragedy * Booklist *
ISBN: 9781787335103
Dimensions: 222mm x 138mm x 25mm
Weight: 400g
272 pages