Joanne Hichens lost first her mother, then, in quick succession, her husband, her father and her mother-in-law - two deaths anticipated, two coming as the worst kind of shock. In this memoir of grief and recovery, she writes with honesty and humour of death, our 'constant companion', and the stumbling journey through the country of grief.

By turns searing and sparkling, her account gives compelling insight into the losses that stalk us all, while also celebrating the mainstays of life - friendship, family, and the memories of those we love and lose.

A compelling and agonising story.

Durban-based journalist Glynis Horning and her husband Chris woke up one Sunday morning almost two years ago to the devastating discovery of their 25-year-old son Spencer dead in his bed. Horning’s story chronicles a parent’s worst nightmare. Establishing that his death was suicide, Horning embarks on a journey of anguished self-recrimination.

Should she not have seen the signs? Could she somehow have prevented it? As she struggles with Spencer’s decision to end his life, she has to learn to understand what the depths of depression entail. We feel Horning’s pain, and learn to understand and feel Spencer’s pain, at a visceral level.

Surrounded by loving family and friends, Horning pieces together the puzzle of Spencer’s death, writing with a brutal and heart-searing intensity of grief and loss, but also of the joys of celebrating her son’s life. This book will touch anyone who has experienced a mental health journey directly or indirectly, or a searing loss. Her wisdom and insight are extraordinary.

This guide is written with love and care by a palliative nursing sister to help ease the journey for patients and their loved ones.

This book offers mindful advice for patients and their loved ones on navigating the cancer journey – from the time of diagnosis to remission or terminal stages – armed with appropriate information and emotional support. It covers the practical aspects of cancer treatment in a simple, comprehensive way – from medical aids, treatments and side effects to nutrition, complementary therapies and caring for a loved one. It also addresses questions and fears, what to say and do, and how to deal with a terminal diagnosis.

Amongst this, you will also find stories of how others experienced and managed their cancer journey.

The second, revised edition of Healing for Trauma: In The South African Context is an in-depth, comprehensive guide that is grounded in decades-long, first-hand experience in trauma counselling. The second edition has not only been updated and revised, but also contains new chapters, as well as passages on the effect of Covid-19.

Both trauma counsellors and victims will benefit from the accessible, relevant content, which contains general wisdom and spiritual guidance. Each chapter contains valuable guidelines on how to support people who have experienced specific forms of trauma within the South African context.

This updated edition will appeal to a wide variety of groups within the South African society. Although the book has been written from a Christian perspective, the trauma techniques are scientifically sound and can be used by a broader general market. Individual healing has a rippling effect on the community as a whole, and benefits everyone. Yvonne Retief's central message is one of hope: there is healing and hope for victims of trauma.

Dit is die verhaal van ’n vrou wat haar familie in ’n terreuraanval verloor. Dit vertel van ’n gelowige wat in gehoorsaamheid leef, net sodat die mat onder haar uitgeruk kan word. Die boek sal die leser aanmoedig om die werklike koste van ons geloof te bereken, na te dink oor die karakter van God en ons identiteit as Sy kinders. Hannelie se verhaal is ’n merkwaardige getuienis van ’n lewe in geloof en die krag van vergifnis.

This creatively touching work follows the true-life journey of a woman dealing with the sudden loss of her husband. The powerfully emotional narrative tells the story of Beryl Botman who reveals to Russel Botman how she is experiencing his sudden death and learning to cope with it. “How should she learn to live and recognise their love for each other in these new dimensions of existence?” is the central question of the heart-breaking one-way conversation.

The events take place from the moments before she realises that Russel has died until the day of the first anniversary of his death - the lapse of one year. It is for her the year in which she appeals to her deepest strengths, facing her most murky weaknesses and relying on her whole formation to take even one step.

The narrative takes place in three parts and begins with a day-by-day version of the first two weeks of experiences and sensations. The next two parts are weekly and then monthly revelations, respectively. Her spiritual and real exposure follow a journey from Stellenbosch to Wynberg and some other places in the world. Beryl handles life-changing decisions and actions in her world with the comfort and loving support of family and friends, while dealing with the hostility of other family members and the aloofness and rejection of friends and acquaintances at the same time.

It’s a turmoil of raw emotions, grief, acceptance and coping – going on with life, when life as you knew it, has ended.

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.

Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.

In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie’s canon.

Louisa Zondo’s work has helped to shape the new South Africa, but she has also faced intense grief and trauma, which came from the underside of the emerging nation’s complex social fabric.

As mother of much-loved music star Riky Rick, who tragically took his own life in 2022, Louisa Zondo’s loss was shared by millions, but it was also a uniquely deep, lonely and lifeshattering grief. The loss of her beloved MaRiky also brought to the surface cataclysmic trauma from her past.

As Louisa Zondo takes her first small steps to facing her grief, she finds herself speaking to her son in a series of letters, gradually finding the words to express her love for him, and the pain of losing him. In expressing that love, she tells the story of her own life and the experiences that shaped her.

This brave journey brings Louisa to a deeper understanding of her life’s path, and closer to healing.

A personal and powerful essay on loss from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.

'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language'

On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria.

In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.

’n Versameling van 100 gedigte oor verlies en vertroosting deur van Afrikaans se bekendste digters.

Dis oor verse die dood, rou, afskeid, verganklikheid en menswees.

Die lewe is ‘n asem lank is die ideale geskenk aan iemand wat ’n geliefde vir altyd moes groet ̶ veral wanneer ’n mens nie die woorde kan vind om te troos nie.

Immediately in the aftermath of his wife Andrea’s death, Gerry Pelser began documenting his thoughts and feelings about his brand-new life as a ‘reluctant’ widower on social media as no one wants to be an ‘enthusiastic’ widower. Semi-daily snippets of candid and raw expressions of grief, fear, and confusion – punctuated with unexpected humour – went up on Facebook for the world to see.

Several posts went viral, and messages of support poured in from strangers as far away from India and New Zealand. Numerous of these encouraged Gerry to publish his posts as a book, simply because his posts helped people with their own healing and who wanted to share their recovery with other people.

In a surprisingly funny and heartfelt manner, Gerry breaks the fourth wall and tells his tale directly to the reader in a way that puts them with their feet up on his living-room couch: a memoir of an unlikely courtship, of love, dogs, a literal fairy-tale wedding, cricket, marriage, and the importance of stuffed animals. Of illness, personal wars and the eventual – unavoidable defeat – of dealing with the insistent question of ‘what now’ that follows in its wake. And ultimately, the possibility of healing.

This memoir is an honest tale of Love, Death and Life; heart-warming in its humour, heart breaking in its content and hopeful in its message. Chronicles of a Reluctant is a raw tale paying homage to Gerry’s late wife Andrea.

This book promises to be a landmark of exploration on a subject that eventually touches us all: dealing with grief. And the life that follows.

Multiple award-winning author Elsa Joubert's memoir about life after the death of her beloved husband. She must come to terms with the loss of independence, friends who die and the changes in her memory and bodily powers. Vivid memories of her eventful life as a celebrated writer are skilfully woven into her story. Filled with wisdom, compassion and humour, this book will leave no reader untouched.

13 Augustus 2017. Ansja vat haar twee dogtertjies kerk toe. Heeldag het sy ʼn naar gevoel op die krop van haar maag, asof iemand haar wind uitgeskop het. Sy hou by ʼn stopstraat naby hul huis stil en ʼn motor jaag van agter in hulle vas. Haar jongste dogtertjie, Larissa, se kop word met die impak vergruis soos ʼn waatlemoen.

Met bomenslike krag sleep sy haar dogters uit die kar en sit hulle op die sypaadjie neer. Dan verloor sy haar bewussyn en sien haarself en haar kinders van bo. Alles word lig. Daar is lieflike musiek en reënboogkleure. Vrede en liefde heers en niks maak meer saak nie. Sy dryf weg.

Maar dan hoor sy haar oudste dogtertjie na haar roep. En sy moet terug. Na die pyn van ʼn gebreekte lyf en gebroke hart. Hoe hervat sy haar lewe?

The English language has no specific word for the parent that has lost a child. There exist words for orphan, widow and widower, but there is no word that captures and conveys this tragic type of loss.

It has been eleven years since Diane Foley's son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending.

In American Mother, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane's story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death, in which Diane came face to face with one of the men responsible for her son's kidnapping and torture. A testament to the power of radical empathy and moral courage, American Mother takes us inside one woman's extraordinary journey to find connection in a world torn asunder, and to fight for others as a way to keep her son's memory alive.

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021 The New York Times bestseller from the Grammy-nominated indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity in the wake of her loss. 'As good as everyone says it is and, yes, it will have you in tears. An essential read for anybody who has lost a loved one, as well as those who haven't' - Marie-Claire In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band - and meeting the man who would become her husband - her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread. 'Possibly the best book I've read all year . . . I will be buying copies for friends and family this Christmas.' - Rukmini Iyer in the Guardian 'Best Food Books of 2021' 'Wonderful . . . The writing about Korean food is gorgeous . . . but as a brilliant kimchi-related metaphor shows, Zauner's deepest concern is the ferment, and delicacy, of complicated lives.' - Victoria Segal, Sunday Times, 'My favourite read of the year'

A personal and powerful essay on loss from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. 'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language' On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.

Die tweede, hersiene uitgawe van Genesing vir Trauma is ’n diepgaande, omvattende handleiding wat steun op dekade lange eerstehandse ervaring in berading. Die tweede uitgawe is nie net volledig opgedateer en bygewerk nie, maar bevat ook nuwe hoofstukke, soos die hoofstuk oor die impak van Covid-19.

Beide beraders en slagoffers sal kan baat vind by die verstaanbare, relevante inhoud propvol algemene wysheid en geestelike begeleiding. Elke hoofstuk bevat waardevolle riglyne oor hoe om mense wat 'n spesifieke vorm van trauma beleef het by te staan, en wel binne die Suid-Afrikaanse konteks.

Hierdie opgedateerde uitgawe spreek tot alle groepe binne die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing. Hoewel die boek vanuit 'n Christelike perspektief geskryf is, is die beradingstegnieke wetenskaplik-gefundeerd en kan dit deur 'n wyer mark gebruik word. Individuele genesing het ’n genesende uitkringeffek op die gemeenskap wat vir almal van belang is. Yvonne Retief se sentrale boodskap is dat daar genesing en hoop vir slagoffers van trauma is.

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their daughter fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then she was placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. This powerful book is Didion's 'attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness'. The result is a personal yet universal portrait of marriage and life, in good times and bad, from one of the defining voices of American literature. 'Beautiful and devastating ... Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential' Zadie Smith

Van die oomblik wat ons gebore word, begin ons ook te sterf. Maar al is die dood een van die algemeenste menslike gebeurtenisse, vermy die meeste mense om daaroor te dink of te praat. Wreed En Mooi Is Die Dood – met bydraes deur gewilde Afrikaanse skrywers – probeer hierdie stilte te verbreek.

Deur hul diep persoonlike verhale oor verlies en heling te deel, bied die bydraers onbewustelik ook raad vir hoe om die hartseer van ’n geliefde se dood te verwerk en hoe om jou eie sterflikheid te konfronteer. So vertel Marita van der Vyver van haar babaseun se dood, terwyl Valda Jansen beskryf hoe sy lamgelê is deur die nuus dat sy kanker het en Kerneels Breytenbach deel sy ervaring van eensaamheid na sy vrou se dood. ’n Paramedikus beskryf sy daaglikse ontmoetings met die dood, daar is ’n lys van dinge wat ’n mens vir ’n sterwende moet sê en nie moet sê nie en ook ’n bespreking van die rituele om die dood. Daar is soms selfs ’n bietjie humor . . . soos die storie oor die jong dominee wat in ’n leë graf geval het en Annelie Botes se voorbereidings vir haar begrafnis.

Dit is ’n aangrypende boek wat beloof om lesers te roer en weer te laat dink oor hulle prioriteite in die lewe.