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A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.
What are you reading this week? (7/10/2025)
On advice from a book club member, I'm reading Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. The author speaks to the shocking numbness that the sudden death of a loved one can bring. The grieving delayed as life and its customary demands pu...
-Connie_K
If you could suggest one book for The Busybody Book Club to read, what would it be and why?
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. This book made such an impression on me this year. So did Geraldine Brooks' Memorial Days . Both are nonfiction, beautifully written and moving stories. I think each member of that bookclub would relate in some way to these books. For a lighter, but no less poignant ...
-Barbara_E
What are you reading this week? (5/1/2025)
A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedora Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks The Tell by Amy Griffin A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men by Shannon Monaghan
-Shirley_T
"Brooks's spare yet forceful prose and admirable determination to stare pain in the face go a long way toward achieving that goal. Readers reckoning with the loss of a loved one will find wisdom in these pages." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Brooks, with arresting precision, sensitivity, and candor, takes deep soundings of her grief and evolving perceptions and feelings in a generous and resonant remembrance. ... Brooks' many fans will want to learn more about her, while ardent memoir readers and those looking for books about grief will also reach for Memorial Days." —Booklist (starred review)
"Brooks pays homage to the loving, gregarious Horwitz, lashes out at America's flawed medical system, and deftly conveys the ongoing reverberations of her shattering experience. Like other widowed writers (Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates), Brooks both relives the trauma of her husband's death and keeps his cherished memory alive. A graceful and moving meditation on bereavement." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Memorial Days was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Randi Baird
Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.
In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master's program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. The following year they received a citation for excellence for their series, "War and Peace." In ...
... Full Biography
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Link to Geraldine Brooks's Website
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