Fi

A Memoir of My Son

Alexandra Fuller

$34.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

JONATHAN CAPE
16 July 2024

Biography; Memoirs; Coping with death & bereavement; Complementary therapies, healing & health

From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career-defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child

From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career-defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child

'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk

It's midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.

And then - suddenly and incomprehensibly - her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.

No stranger to loss - young siblings, a parent, a home country - Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers - in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

By: Alexandra Fuller
Imprint: JONATHAN CAPE
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 300g
ISBN: 9781787335110
ISBN 10: 1787335119
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 16 July 2024
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Alexandra Fuller is the author of four memoirs, including Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-Fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian's First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize - and the New York Times-bestselling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, two books of non-fiction, and the novel Quiet Until the Thaw. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times.

Reviews for Fi: A Memoir of My Son

A book that deserves to be read for generations * Guardian, praise for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight * This enchanting book is destined to become a classic of Africa and of childhood * Sunday Times, praise for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight * Perceptive, generous, political, tragic, funny, stamped through with a passionate love for Africa... Fuller has a faultless hotline to her six-year-old self * Independent, praise for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight *