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The Flower Bearers

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What to expect

'A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world' Julia Samuel

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, her closest friend, Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Rachel Eliza was learning to exist without her, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Rachel Eliza realized that to survive her heartbreak, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day.

And so Rachel Eliza chronicles her seventeen years of friendship with Aisha. From the moment they met in a college library, she knew she had found a soul sister. Their life together was filled with music: they danced to records in their apartments and skipped from one sticky jazz bar to another. Sitting side-by-side at poetry circles, reading Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, marching through Harlem protesting lost Black lives, Rachel Eliza drew inspiration and strength from her friend. Together they learnt to embrace themselves, as writers, artists, and Black women.

Rachel Eliza interweaves this love story with another, that of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the depth of their connection. Celebrating the ways that these two extraordinary people have transformed her life, she reflects on the beauty and pain that come with opening oneself fully to love.

Critics Review

Rachel Eliza Griffith's powerful memoir stunned me. With a poet's precision, she renders two interwoven tragedies few others could've lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor. Love powers both tales, and that's the source of the book's deep grace. She blesses us all with a survivor's singular memoir destined to be celebrated for aeons
Mary Karr
A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world
Julia Samuel
This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing
Kirkus, starred review
Unsparing and full-throated. In The Flower Bearers, grief is to love as pain is to pleasure. Through the lens of a poet and documentarian, Griffiths deftly explores what it is to bear witness and to remain present. The Flower Bearers offers a transformative testament to the fragility of life and the compulsion to look when others look away. Griffiths' call to document and make sense of the horror, the fear, and the gut-wrenching pain of loss is, at its core, an exploration of capacity, resilience, and the deeply human need to remain open to love in all its forms.
A. M. Holmes
What a gift The Flower Bearers is. Tenderly, carefully, Rachel Eliza Griffiths excavates deep into matters of her heart, and her sentences make space for readers to do the same. Griffiths writes with beauty and consideration, not just about what happens when grief wrecks your foundations, but the light that emerges through those cracks. This is a precise and intentional masterwork, that reminded me of the power of love that endures.
Caleb Azumah Nelson

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