Memorial Days – A Memoir of Grief and Healing on Flinders Island, Tasmania | Geraldine Brooks | 2024 [NEW – SC]

Geraldine Brooks's memoir of grief — written in a remote shack on Flinders Island in Bass Strait off the coast of Tasmania — after the sudden death of her husband of over thirty years, the American writer Tony Horwitz.

On Memorial Day 2019, Horwitz collapsed and died on a Washington DC street while on book tour, aged sixty. Brooks — Pulitzer Prize-winning Australian novelist and author of Horse, March and Year of Wonders — spent three years managing the immediate demands of loss: the bureaucracy, her sons, the completion of her novel Horse. She suppressed the grief she couldn't yet afford to feel.

Three years later she flew to Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania, and rented a three-room shack overlooking the sea. She walked the island's beaches and rugged coastline, reflected on Horwitz's life and their decades together, examined what various cultures offer to the bereaved, and finally gave herself permission to mourn. The book alternates between that time on the island and the immediate aftermath of his death in 2019.

Flinders Island is woven into the Tasmanian Aboriginal history Brooks also reflects upon — Wybalenna, the site of the forced exile of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, lies on the same island where she chose to grieve.

BOOK DETAILS

• Softcover.
• Published 2026 by HarperCollins Australia.
• 212-pages

CONDITION

New.

DELIVERY & IN-STORE PICKUP

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