Thirty Days

A Journey to the End of Love

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Pub Date Oct 09 2018 | Archive Date Sep 26 2018
Text Publishing | Text Publishing Company

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Description

One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn’s dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her.


Kerryn Baker lived for only ten months after her shock cancer diagnosis. Before she died, she told her historian husband to write about her life—knowing writing would help him find a way out of grief. Mark wrote the book in the period known in Jewish tradition as the Shloshim—the first thirty days of mourning following the seven days of the Shiva.

Thirty Days is a meditation on life, death, love and marriage—it bares the souls of two people who shared a life since their schooldays, and unexpectedly found themselves at the end of a journey of love.

One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn’s dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her...


Advance Praise

‘A book characterised by love, empathy and connection to life.’—Sydney Morning Herald

‘A beautiful memoir, not just about one marriage, but the nature of marriage itself.’—Readings‘Baker presents, with extraordinary openness, the vulnerable experience of early mourning. He describes his traumatic experiences with a historian’s precision, aware of the trip­ wires, elisions and exaggerations attending the recording of evidence.’—The Weekend Australian
'A courageous and intimate portrait of a marriage that will leave you devastated, enriched, irrevocably altered.’—Emily Bitto, author of The Strays
‘Piercing, unsparing, and sweet, this book will break your heart and put it back together again.’—Miranda Richmond Mouillot, author of A Fifty-year Silence
‘Baker’s memoir allows his readers to see the magnitude of our existence beneath the surface of our daily lives.’—The Courier Mail
‘During his first thirty days of mourning, Mark Baker wrote about his wife Kerryn Baker, who lived an “ordinary” life, as most of us do, but who was extraordinary in the courage, dignity, and above all, the gentle, wise grace of her dying. Few of us will be able to die so well, but every reader of this book will be inspired to do so.Baker recalls their life together and writes of Kerryn’s death and dying in many tones—lyrically, tenderly, with self-deprecating irony, embarrassed candour and more—but one hears in them all pain so raw and need so desperate that it sometimes threatened to unhinge him. This elegy of love and grief takes back to our hearts knowledge that is too often only in our heads—that the disappearance of a human personality will forever be mysterious to us because every human being is irreplaceable.’—Raimond Gaita, author of Romulus, My Father
‘A lament, a wail, a raw confession of suffering and regret, but most of all, of love.’—Ramona Koval, author of By the Book

‘A book characterised by love, empathy and connection to life.’—Sydney Morning Herald

‘A beautiful memoir, not just about one marriage, but the nature of marriage itself.’—Readings‘Baker presents...

Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781925498677
PRICE $22.95 (USD)
PAGES 256

Average rating from 5 members


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