Ruthlessly honest memoir of a widow's pain in coming to terms with the death of her husband.

This haunting memoir of grief recounts the death from cancer of Nick Clarke, much-loved BBC radio presenter of THE WORLD AT ONE - and the aftermath - from his widow Barbara's point of view.

With painful honesty, Barbara lays open her ambivalent feelings about the illness as it progressed, and her instinctive fear that this would be the end. As he got sicker, her fear grew, until he died an unfeasibly short time after his diagnosis.

Barbara chronicles in unflinching prose her life after his death. A howl of anguish and anger, she describes how many of her friends and colleagues don't call, and don't offer support - how alone she is, and how she struggles to explain the unexplainable to her young twin sons. She has a breakdown, and a short-lived relationship (met with condemnation from some of her friends), but knows the process of dealing with her grief is barely beginning.

A ruthlessly honest dissection of a widow's pain, this book is also a love story - an uncomfortably raw, utterly compelling memoir which ends without resolution; its author still fighting to come to terms with the hand life has dealt her.

Books by Barbara Want