The Guardians

A moving elegy that also happens to be an original, probing, shiningly intelligent work of literature -- James Lasdun
A moving, personal account of Harris' death, and the confusion, disillusionment, guilt and grief that accompany it. The Guardians is... a comment on the fleeting, relentless and unpredictable nature of existence -- Naomi Polonsky * Evening Standard *
An ode to the known and the unknown, to intimacy in life and separation in death and simply to the death of a friend... a masterpiece. -- Iain Finlayson * The Times *
A slim volume as clear and sharp as a shard of glass... written in spare, unflinching prose that does not shy from uncomfortable questions... Brief but intense, full of startling observations that make you think again about the nature of loss -- Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy * Observer *
Majors in bone-on-bone rawness, exposed nerve endings... very pure and elemental. I wanted nothing coming between me and the page -- David Shields * LA Times *
I loved The Guardians, for its honesty and its struggle. Manguso's memoir is a song, sung sadly and too late, but sung nevertheless -- Samantha Harvey
Manguso has created a form to encompass the way life passes: plodding, breathless and unrelenting * New Yorker *
Manguso's book is less concerned with the phenomenology of grief than with the methodology of grief-writing... What Manguso wants to catch is not a sense of what happened, but rather... to evoke the intimate and the incidental -- Leo Robson * Guardian *
A memoir that reveals not the just intimacies of the writer's life, but of your own. Most moving is that The Guardians covers a subject so rarely recognized in our society, the grief from the death of a friend * O, the Oprah Magazine *
An elegy for an entire generation -- Catherine Taylor, Books of the Year * Sunday Telegraph *
Goes to hell and back, just barely back... It's the only affirmation that anyone can offer: astonishingly, we're here. The book majors in exposed nerve endings -- David Shields * Dazed and Confused *