Description

**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2026*
**WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION 2025**
**LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026**

‘Please read this book. It may very well change how you live’ Rachel Clarke
‘Filled with love…I was spellbound’ Kathryn Mannix
‘Brilliant…so special’ Guardian
An inspiring true story about life, love and letting go
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. He was in some ways a very ordinary man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels and his local church. Yet as Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David through his final days, they realised how extraordinary he really was.
This loving, clear-eyed and unforgettable book shows how death may be met and understood as a part of life – a universal experience that is terrible and beautiful, intimate and real, sometimes all at once.
*A Book of the Year for The Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Observer*
‘Beautiful and profound and completely gripping’ Mark Haddon
‘A must-read’ The Times
‘We cannot be but somewhat changed by this remarkable book’ Telegraph
‘This book will be a lifeline for so many people’ Sean Hewitt
‘Perry is in a league of her own’ Sara Collins

Publisher Review

What a luminously beautiful book, an instant classic. Every page is suffused with such honesty, tenderness and love. Few people have written about dying with such clear-eyed accuracy and immense humanity. Never flinching, never sugar-coating, Sarah has captured brilliantly how caring for someone you love in their final days can upend everything you thought you knew about living. Please read this book. It may very well change how you live -- Rachel Clarke Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man is unflinching yet generous, a book that deals with grief and loss and death with acute honesty and without a trace of euphemism, with no retreat into sentimentality. It is scrupulous in its intent and in the writing and by the end I was left shaken, deeply moved. It is beautiful, a work of love and grace -- Christos Tsiolkas I have just sat and read Sarah's wonderful book, nodding and agreeing with so many tiny details that she has noticed and reflected on with a writer's eye and a loving daughter-in-law's heart. Just beautiful. I hope her luminous writing will console and encourage her readers, all of whom are mortals. This book is a slice of reality that comforts even as it confronts us. It is a book filled with love and human frailty, and I was spellbound -- Kathryn Mannix It's very simple - a description of her father-in-law's final illness and death - but it is beautiful and profound and completely gripping... The idea of a pain-free, comfortable birth or a pain-free, comfortable death is as misleading as the idea of a pain free, comfortable life. Death, even a good death, will be hard work at time and must be borne both by the person dying and by those around them. And that is natural and right, and something we learn by living a life -- Mark Haddon I have not been moved like this by a book in a very long time. Death of an Ordinary Man is a masterful piece of writing. It gives dignity and weight to something as ordinary, as extraordinary, as death. By redeeming a common experience in all its intimacy, panic, disorientation and unexpected light, this book will be a lifeline for so many people. Those of us who have witnessed the death of a loved one will thank Sarah Perry for witnessing us in return. -- Sean Hewitt Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man is an act of devotion, not only to her father-in-law but to the art of memoir. What makes this book incredibly special is its intimate attentiveness to dying - how it transforms the subject and their witnesses - in Perry's intelligent, precise and radiant prose. To read this book is a privilege, a gift on the craft of dying. I know I'll reach for it when I need both courage and consolation -- Amy Key This may appear to be a book about death, but really it is a love letter to life that resonates far beyond its own pages. Simply wonderful -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Haunting, mesmerising, fiercely intelligent and deeply humane, Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man is as gripping as any thriller, an exploration of the ways in which every ordinary life and death are unrepeatable, unfathomable, extraordinary -- Naomi Alderman [A] deeply affecting memoir... What grips in these pages, and drives the writing, is Perry's tremendous sense of rhythm and pace... We cannot but be somewhat changed by this remarkable book * Daily Telegraph * As singular and stunning as I knew it would be. Through reading it, I felt I came to know David, and also that I came to know myself better. I could see the world differently afterwards and could feel a little more at peace with it. Only the very best books do that. Sarah is in a league of her own as a writer - I don't know how she does it. -- Sara Collins