Memorial Days

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 INDIE BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony and mystery of life.

'It's personal, immediate, an opening up. It's from the heart . . . Geraldine's gift to us is that she has written her truth' THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S WEEKLY

'Heartbreaking yet hopeful. We're lucky to have Brooks to help us make sense of the world' WA TODAY

'Quiet, vulnerable and tender . . . Radically and beautifully open' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'Another gift from one of our greatest living writers. It is one for all readers, but especially the bereaved, who will find comfort in Brooks' beautiful, aching prose and deft hand' ARTSHUB

'[Brooks] is a practised storyteller and her ease with a sentence brings lilting momentum to the well-trod terrain of literary grief' THE GUARDIAN

'Wise and nourishing' RICHARD GLOVER

'Moving and inspiring' THE AGE

'Both raw and gentle, immediate and nostalgic' CANBERRA TIMES

'A well-wrought heartbreaker' THE AUSTRALIAN

'A beautifully braided memoir of marriage, grief, love and living, it makes you treasure every instant of "normal" life' ANNA FUNDER