A beautifully written, courageous and deeply moving journey from sorrow to acceptance, from loss to hope, shimmering with coastal light and hard-won wisdom.

In Sun Country, Howard Cunnell returns to the southern England beachlands of his boyhood after the death of his mother.

A love letter to the changing coast and sea, Sun Country is a book alive with light and shadow, where the white spaces between words are as charged with tension and power as the words themselves. It is a reckoning with the things we inherit – silence and absence, stories told and untold – and the transgression involved in turning a life into art. At the heart of the book is Gillian, his devoted single mother, and the small yet unforgettable details of her life that are woven into a powerful meditation on impermanence, grief, class and solitude.

At once intimate and expansive, this luminous memoir traces one man’s journey from loss back towards life. Through stories about the writers and painters with whom he feels a kinship – including the English Romantics, W. H. Hudson and Agnes Martin – and the history of his own Sussex working-class family, Cunnell writes his way home to a place, to a culture and to himself as an artist.

Cunnell’s descriptive power, so widely praised in his first memoir, reaches a new breathtaking level, with the simplicity that only comes from the finest craft and poetry.