PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Mark Raphael Baker is the author of The Fiftieth Gate- A Journey Through Memory, a best-selling and seminal book on his parents' experience during the Holocaust which won the NSW Premier's Literary Award. He is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Mark was married for thirty-three years to Kerryn Baker, and has three adult children. He lives in Melbourne.
A courageous and intimate portrait of a marriage that will leave you devastated, enriched, irrevocably altered.' -- Emily Bitto `Piercing, unsparing, and sweet, this book will break your heart and put it back together again.' -- Miranda Richmond Mouillot, author of A Fifty-year Silence `A lament, a wail, a raw confession of suffering and regret, but most of all, of love.' -- Ramona Koval `During his first thirty days of mourning, Mark Baker wrote about his wife Kerryn Baker, who lived an ordinary life, as most of us do, but who was extraordinary in the courage, dignity, and above all, the gentle, wise grace of her dying. Few of us will be able to die so well, but every reader of this book will be inspired to do so. Baker recalls their life together and writes of Kerryn's death and dying in many tones-lyrically, tenderly, with self-deprecating irony, embarrassed candour and more-but one hears in them all pain so raw and need so desperate that it sometimes threatened to unhinge him. He writes of love and grief with power that brings back to our hearts knowledge that is too often only in our heads-that the disappearance of a human personality will forever be mysterious to us because every human being is irreplaceable.' -- Raimond Gaita
