The Red of my Blood
A Death and Life Story
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'With brutal, beautiful honesty, Clover articulates how bereavement shocks and dislocates - and in all the pain, there's SO much life.' MARIAN KEYES
'MUST READ ... A remarkable acount of love and grief.' - DAILY MAIL
'She is a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life's horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on.' SPECTATOR
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'Can death bring something good to my life?'
A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death.
It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human.
'A beautiful addition to the literature of loss. It will serve as a lit match, to be passed from one person to the next in the darkest moments.' THE SUNDAY TIMES
CLOVER STROUD'S NEW BOOK, THE GIANT ON THE SKYLINE: ON HOME, BELONGING AND LEARNING TO LET GO, IS OUT ON 9 MAY
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As Stroud puts it, she writes “about how life feels”. This, her third memoir, details the grief-riddled year following the sudden death of her older sister, Nell, at just 46, shortly before the pandemic. Like Stroud’s previous books—the first about losing her mother after a catastrophic horse-riding accident, the next about the challenges of motherhood (she has five children)—The Red of my Blood is intensely raw and vivid; with seemingly unfiltered sentences tumbling onto the page. It certainly won’t be an easy read if you have recently lost someone. It’s hard to muse on life’s universal themes—love, death, sex, family—without resorting to cliché but Stroud’s writing is exquisite. Nell is “always there in my head but absolutely nowhere to be found”, she laments, noting that the act of missing her sister seeps into every aspect of her life, getting everywhere “like glitter”.
