Thirty Days

‘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