“To say I have a memory like a sieve would be an insult to sieves. I have a memory like a basketball filled with glue. I have a memory like a plastic croissant on a windowsill that someone is pointing to and saying, it looks so real.”

In this exquisite, darkly comic debut, we meet a poet looking around at a life he can’t remember how to live. Surrounded by books, he now finds reading unbearable; stories no longer make sense. He has renounced the internet, elevators, television. He is convinced he is dying. He walks wrong-footed and map-less through Italy, Iowa and Iceland, his sense of time collapsed.

The End unravels into a deeply personal double eulogy: for books, and the good life they promised, but also for the author’s mother – a former librarian – whose death has overwritten his world with unanswered questions. How do we tell the story of a loved one’s life if they have chosen to end it? And how can we make sense of our own, derailed by mourning?

As the days break and the poet reckons with these two losses, he slowly finds new ways to inhabit a world grief has toppled, rediscovering meaning, mystery and gratitude – both for what was, and what remains.