Gunn Memorial Library Friday Afternoon Book Club - Memorial Days, By Geraldine Brooks

Book Club Selection Announcement: Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks — A Powerful Memoir of Sudden Loss, Enduring Love, and the Search for Solace

This month, our book club invites you to embark on an unforgettable reading journey with Memorial Days, the newest work from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks. Known for her masterful historical fiction—including the bestselling Horse—Brooks now turns her lens inward, offering an achingly beautiful and deeply personal memoir of love, grief, and healing.

When Brooks’s husband, journalist and author Tony Horwitz, died unexpectedly at the age of sixty, her world was torn apart. The man with whom she had shared a life of purpose and laughter—raising two sons, traveling the world, and building a home on Martha’s Vineyard—was suddenly gone. In the days that followed, Brooks found herself navigating not just sorrow, but the chaos of logistics, bureaucracy, and emotional isolation that often follow sudden loss.

Memorial Days chronicles the three years of aching stillness that followed and the bold decision to seek healing in solitude. Brooks took refuge on a remote island off the coast of Australia, where she spent days in near silence, contemplating the nature of grief and the rituals that might restore her. Her reflections, drawn from personal experience and cross-cultural insight, create a memoir that is both intimate and universal—a guide for anyone who has faced the sharp edge of absence.

In prose as spare as it is luminous, Brooks crafts a love letter to the man she lost and a profound meditation on how we endure and evolve in the wake of devastation. Memorial Days is more than a memoir; it’s a testament to the resilience of the human heart and the deep currents that bind us to those we love.

Registration is required: https://www.gunnlibrary.org/calendar/gml-friday-book-club-memorial-days-by-geraldine-brooks/