The Last Act of Love

Beautiful, devastating and ultimately uplifting, intimate and universal all at once . . . Cathy Rentzenbrink has found a way to express the things that all of us wrestle with at times - knowing how to live and taking the risk to love; facing what has damaged us, and owning it as much as a person can.Jessie Burton, bestselling author of The Miniaturist

Profoundly moving . . . The book's real power lies in Rentzenbrink's skill as a writer, her ability to unearth precise and agonising details quietly, with no self-pity or drama . . . it falls into a tradition of beautifully written accounts of grief, such as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking . . . Rentzenbrink offers a message of enormous hope for anybody who is going through loss, grief or trauma . . . She emerges from this unflinching memoir with dignity, strength and an enormous heartSunday Times

Devastatingly honest and heartbreakingly raw, The Last Act of Love is not simply a book about grief or love or a family's unstinting hope to do the best for their son and brother. It's a book about courage. About the courage to face reality even at its most bleak. And for all the book's sadness it is, ultimately, a book about hope: about how even the darkest tunnels have a glimmer of light beckoning you at the other end. I defy anyone not to be moved by this remarkable and brave story.Hannah Beckerman, author of The Dead Wife's Handbook

This is a brilliant book. Harrowing and heartbreaking, but also warm and human and healing. It is about a rare kind of tragedy, but feels universal, as it is about love and loss and how we learn to live, in the face of what life throws at us. You may well cry, but you will feel better for having read it, which you absolutely must. A triumph of love.Matt Haig, author of Reasons To Stay Alive