"Exceptional soul-stirring story of devastating loss, distracting obsessions, and a family’s agonising struggles to rebuild broken lives through love and honesty."
What a devastatingly honest - and brilliant - book this is. Its portrayal of grief and the absurdity of death - the bizarre, unfathomable fact that someone just isn’t there anymore - are simply incredible. Earth-shatteringly raw and resonant, it’s a book that will break your heart and heal it.
Set in Tasmania and London, Gill and Gabe are thousands of miles from their son, Dougie, when they’re told he’s drowned in a caving accident in England. They rush to London, deciding to keep Dougie’s death from their daughter Sylvie, who’s seriously ill with anorexia, and leaving their adorable youngest child, Teddy in the care of a close friend and his equally adorable grandfather Papabee, who has dementia. In England, chef and food writer Gill can’t face viewing her son’s body, can’t face the fact of Dougie’s death and so she returns to Tasmania, keeping up the pretence that he’s still alive by writing letters from him to Sylvie - it becomes an obsession. In England, Gabe obsesses over every excruciating detail of Dougie’s death, both of them distracting themselves from the truth. In contrast, Teddy is working to uncover the truth of Sylvie’s illness, believing she’ll get well if he can work out when it began - his love and steadfast determination to save his sister are incredibly touching, and I cannot praise the authentic, tender representation of his relationship with granddad Papabee enough. Inseparable, they have their own “TeddyandPapabee” collective noun. Teddy also perfectly expresses brutal truths about death and grief with piercing honesty: “When Dougie went into that little box, I thought the main bit of his dying was finished. I was wrong. Nobody tells you that being dead just keeps on going… he’s dead every day.” Similarly, in her haunting monologues, Sylvie reveals brutal truths about her anorexia.
Peppered with Gill’s heart-breaking recipes (Mediterranean vegetable soup for the day you land in England to collect your son’s body; Roast beetroot salad for the week after your son’s post-mortem results are released), the story reels and swerves to a truly edge-of-your-seat, hold-your-breath conclusion. While the family’s pain and grief always tangible, the buds of healing are too. What a book.
| Primary Genre | Family Drama |
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| Recommendations: |
An engrossing story of grief, family closeness and stresses, secrets, and cooking. It poses the question of how far you will go to keep your remaining children safe when one of them dies suddenly.
This is an engrossing story of grief, family closeness and stresses, secrets, and cooking. It poses the serious question of how far you will go to keep your remaining children safe when one of them dies suddenly. When Gill and Gabe’s son Dougie dies suddenly thousands of miles from home, they are faced with the dilemma of how to tell their teenaged daughter Sylvie, seriously ill in hospital, that her beloved brother has died. Their fear that the news will kill her too means they take a risky and unorthodox approach to managing the coming months.
It was easy to empathise with Gill and Gabe and to understand their actions, but there are times you want to shout “Stop, don’t do that!... Read Full Review
A wonderful book of family, food, love and loss. I adored it.
I was lucky enough to request and be sent a copy of this book by LoveReading and it’s fair to say that I was a bit dubious about the subject, as it deals with the aftermath of the death of a teenage boy. But once I’d started I couldn’t stop reading and absolutely adored it. I really didn’t want to put it down and when I did I found myself thinking about and missing the characters. I also took sneaky breaks from what I should have been doing to read a couple more pages.
While the book is obviously about grief and its impact on a family, the overwhelming emotion is always love – all the different kinds that exist within a family, how it can bring people together but also push them apart.... Read Full Review
A beautifully written, deep and poignant book about loss and the various ways different people deal with grief within a family.
This is a beautifully written, deep and poignant book about loss and the various ways different people deal with grief. It is written from different familial points of view following the death in the UK of a teenager Dougie: Gill, his mother who is a food writer in Tasmania; her husband Gabe; their daughter, Sylvie, who has been a hospital inpatient with (rather ironically given Gill’s occupation) anorexia for several years; and their young son, Teddy; plus it also features Papabee, Teddy and Sylvie’s grandfather. Dougie died in a potholing tragedy whilst on his gap year and this sparks the title of the book as Gill begins producing recipes in a rather obsessive way linked to her grief. Meanwhile Gabe researches the accident, equally rather obsessively.... Read Full Review
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