Fi

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the award-winning and bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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.

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. 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.


'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD

‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMES

©2024 Alexandra Fuller (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

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
[A] memoir…as raw and heart-shattering as you would expect, while still being a thing of beauty
i
Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain inflicted by “the sharp knife of a short life”
Guardian

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