This Ragged Grace

by Octavia Bright

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Pub Date 1 Jun 2023 | Archive Date 1 Jun 2023

Canongate

Biographies & Memoirs

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Description

A beautiful, brave, ideas-rich, open and electric reckoning – with addiction, loss, self and hope in your twenties and thirties

This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia’s journey through recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. Looking back over this time, each of the seven chapters explores the feelings and experiences of the corresponding year of her recovery, tracing the shift in emotion and understanding that comes with the deepening connection to this new way of life. Over the course of this seven-year period, life continues to unfold. Paths are abandoned, people fall ill, waters get choppy, seemingly impossible things are navigated without the old fixes.

As Octavia moves between London, the island of Stromboli, New York, Cornwall and Margate, each place offers something new but ultimately always delivers the same message: that wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Advance Praise

‘An extraordinary, electrifying book about loss, chaos, addiction and death, and the wild work of staying tender in the face of it’
OLIVIA LAING

‘The intelligence of the writing is a kind of grace in itself - light and deep and beautiful’
DEBORAH LEVY

‘This Ragged Grace is smart and tender, and honest in that raw way that gets you at the back of your throat. It is slowly revealing of the world, and an avalanche of feeling, all at the same time. A towering act of grace, in fact’
EMILIE PINE

‘How lucky we are that Octavia Bright has written this book, full of rich, subtle, hard-won, beautifully woven wisdom and love. Read this book and carry its light with you forever’
DAMIAN LeBAS

‘This Ragged Grace is a courageous work, filled with a deep tenderness and generosity and authenticity, the voice of Octavia Bright stays with me, it is honest, intricate, raw and real. This Ragged Grace is so beautiful, so bold and so Bright’
SALENA GODDEN

‘This Ragged Grace examines the fragility of the self in exquisite detail. Generous, compelling, poignant and ultimately, life affirming; Bright has managed to capture the complexity of being human’
HEIDI JAMES

‘A truly enlightening read: poetic, courageous and surprising. Beautiful, intelligent prose and such a brave journey into art, family and the deep structures of an addictive personality. On top of that This Ragged Grace is a love letter to the sea and the wisdom we share with it. I loved it’
DORTHE NORS

‘An intellectually astute and open-hearted account of a life-turned-work-of-art, which draws its reader into conversation with our own attempts at renewal’
ELLENA SAVAGE