An autobiographical love letter written in breathless and tragic prose, this novel is as powerful and raw as it is tender and beautiful. Full of humanity and hypnotic in its telling, it is one of the best books of love, loss, resilience and hope I’ve read in a very long time. ( )

An autobiographical love letter written in breathless and tragic prose, this novel is as powerful and raw as it is tender and beautiful. Full of humanity and hypnotic in its telling, it is one of the best books of love, loss, resilience and hope I’ve read in a very long time. ( )

As I read I assumed I was reading a memoir, but it's classified as "literary fiction." It is so authentic, though, so wrenching, there's no way it's anything but true.

I loved this book, painful as it was to read. The style reminded me a little of Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose books have also been termed autofiction. Some reviewers disliked the literary flourishes: running conversations together in one paragraph so that it was difficult to figure out who was talking; shifts in tense and time periods. To me, this was its beauty. It's the way one's brain works after horrific tragedy.

Other reviewers commented that there was very little feeling in the writing; again I disagree. It felt as if it was poured out from Malmquist's heart and soul. ( )

'All you can do is fall to pieces and then come back.'

This is a brave, honest autobiographical novel about losing a wife, being a single father, and of coping with family relationships. I liked the way that Malmquist weaves the story back and forward in time, in a way which mirrors how we both live in the present and are haunted (or comforted) by memories of the past. The final section of the 'novel' - or is it a fictionalised memoir? - is a heart-wrenching but also uplifting account of how Tom is coping with grief whilst starting a new life with his daughter. Moving and powerful stuff. ( )

After a great start this book disappointed me somewhat. Sure, the failure to show speech clearly and to distinguish between different speakers, and the unheralded time jump, were all off-putting. But even more off-putting was the feeling that after his wife died the narrator didn't really have a story to tell. ( )