Geraldine Brooks, the author of the acclaimed novel “Horse”, and Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author of the best seller “Confederates in the Attic” had been married for 35 years when Horwitz literally dropped dead one morning on a D.C. street.  Brooks learns of this in a phone call from a harried resident in the GW Emergency Room while she is alone in their house on Martha’s Vineyard.  Life has totally changed in an instant.

In alternating chapters, Brooks describes the chaos and heartbreak of those first few days after Horwitz died and her attempt three years later to come to terms with her grief by traveling to Flinders Island off of Tasmania where she and Horwitz had lived years ago.  The writing is spectacular, telegraphic at times and richly woven at others, as Brooks is finally able to ‘howl’ about her loss rather than keeping it together in what she refers to as a Potemkin village of stability for her two sons, friends, and editors.

Here’s how she describes her time in Flinders: “I can’t sleep, despite the absolute quiet of this place.  I have intentionally put myself back where I was on the worst day of my life. It is what I came here to do; to uncover every memory of that time and experience the full measure of the grief I had denied myself”. She writes with equal beauty of nature and her inner turmoil. About the seacoast she writes: “The limpets are huge and designer-striped in shades of sienna, cream and russet. There are gleaming sheets of mica and a smooth yellow intrusion of stone with a cube-shaped crystal that I later learn is orthoclase, potassium feldspar. There are pockets of samphire–sea asparagus—the ocean’s best crunchy, salty snack.”  And this brief characterization of a new access road leading to a mega-mansion on the largely empty island: “Roads are fragmenters of habitat, pathways for invasive species, eroders of soil, silters of watercourses.”  Fine writing, indeed.

Her writing about Horwitz and the wonderful marriage and love affair they shared is similarly moving without being sentimental.  This is a fine book which will grab you by the throat in its opening paragraph and not let go until you finish it.  The Washington Post’s reviewer summarized this book as “Wielding precise and often beautiful language and, in the most graceful way possible, pointing a way forward. A rich account of marriage and mourning.”   Strongly recommended.