Product Description
Death of an Ordinary Man
Author: Sarah Perry
Format: Paperback
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2026
Winner of the Nero Book Awards Non-Fiction Award 2025
Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2026
'Please read this book. It may very well change how you live' — Rachel Clarke
'I was spellbound' — Kathryn Mannix
This is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, the universal aspect of life, and it is a book about family, and care and love.
Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.
'Beautiful and profound and completely gripping' — Mark Haddon
'We cannot be but somewhat changed by this remarkable book' — Daily Telegraph
'By the end I was left shaken, deeply moved' — Christos Tsiolkas
'This book will be a lifeline for so many people' — Seán Hewitt
'Sarah is in a league of her own as a writer - I don't know how she does it' — Sara Collins
'A love letter to life that resonates far beyond its own pages' — Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
About the Author
Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Death of an Ordinary Man and Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award. Enlightenment was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and her other work has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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