Sarah Perry

A spectacularly original memoir that’s at once an elegy for a beloved family member and a deeply moving meditation on what it means to be a mortal creature, from one of our greatest novelists.

Death of an Ordinary Man opens on a charming, merry seaside scene in late August. Perry, her husband, and her father-in-law David are at the Yarmouth carnival they’ve gone to every summer for decades. The day was fine, Perry tells us, and the shining tide was going out. The next time Sarah sees David three weeks later, watching him approach across the market, she knows instantly and with a certainty she’s never had before: David is dying. He’ll be dead in less than three months’ time from a rare and swiftly moving cancer.

What follows is Perry’s intimate account of sitting at David’s bedside across the final days of his life. She lays out in plain and scientific detail what the end of a human life looks like, and invites readers into the most mundane and extraordinary moments of a devastating stretch of days. Throughout, she interweaves her own experience with accounts of death throughout the ages, as well as the poetry and philosophy humans have created and turned to for comfort in the face of loss. Her trademark blend of the scientific and factual with the spiritual and artistic captures the fact that, ultimately, dying is the most human thing any of us will do. Perhaps most importantly, she tells us who David is and was—the way he drank his tea and the sections of the newspaper he always read first, the things that made him laugh and the people and animals that he loved. She mourns all that will be lost forever with his passing, even as she celebrates that he was here in the first place.

Written in Perry’s inimitable style and riveting from its opening pages, Death of an Ordinary Man is both abundantly human and marvelously transcendent, and reminds us again and again that there are no ordinary men.