Memorial Days
Geraldine Brooks
Hachette, 2025
Geraldine Brooks is known as one of Australia’s most accomplished novelists, journalists and non-fiction writers.
Whilst beginning her career as a writer as a newspaper columnist, she moved into international reporting before becoming a novelist with Year of Wonders, about the experience of plague in 1666 by the village of Eyam, then March, concerning the father of Little Women, absent for much of the story of his daughters, serving as a Civil War chaplain. Her journalistic attention to detail remains a feature of her fiction – she is often drawn to historical subject matter – but in this case the subject matter is deeply personal.
During 2019, Brooks’ husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, Tony Horwitz, was on a tour promoting his most recent publication, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. Brooks and Horwitz met at Columbia University where they were both studying journalism. They married in 1983 and had two sons together, carving out an exciting life together of travel and reporting through Africa, Europe and the Middle East. During his last book tour, Horwitz had a massive heart attack and died before he made it to hospital.
In America, they had forged an idyllic life for their family on Martha’s Vineyard and she is there working on her novel Horse when she receives the call telling her that her beloved husband has died. She must deal with the practicalities of bereavement – telling their sons, getting them home, organising memorials, paying for health insurance and many of the other things that had never crossed her mind whilst her husband lived. She realises, some months after, that she has never truly grieved for Tony, and so goes back to Australia, to Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania, to be alone, to reflect and to process her loss.
Memorial Days is deeply moving and highly engaging on the subject of death and grief, exploring how to honour the life of someone truly known and loved.
