{ "item_title" : "Death of an Ordinary Man", "item_author" : [" Sarah Perry "], "item_description" : "WINNER OF THE NERO NON FICTION AWARD 2026LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON FICTIONA spectacularly original memoir that's at once an elegy for a beloved family member and a deeply moving meditation on what it means to be a mortal creature, from one of our greatest novelists.Death of an Ordinary Man opens on a charming, merry seaside scene in late August. Perry, her husband, and her father-in-law David are at the Yarmouth carnival they've gone to every summer for decades. The day was fine, Perry tells us, and the shining tide was going out. The next time Sarah sees David three weeks later, watching him approach across the market, she knows instantly and with a certainty she's never had before: David is dying. He'll be dead in less than three months' time from a rare and swiftly moving cancer.What follows is Perry's intimate account of sitting at David's bedside across the final days of his life. She lays out in plain and scientific detail what the end of a human life looks like, and invites readers into the most mundane and extraordinary moments of a devastating stretch of days. Throughout, she interweaves her own experience with accounts of death throughout the ages, as well as the poetry and philosophy humans have created and turned to for comfort in the face of loss. Her trademark blend of the scientific and factual with the spiritual and artistic captures the fact that, ultimately, dying is the most human thing any of us will do. Perhaps most importantly, she tells us who David is and was--the way he drank his tea and the sections of the newspaper he always read first, the things that made him laugh and the people and animals that he loved. She mourns all that will be lost forever with his passing, even as she celebrates that he was here in the first place.Written in Perry's inimitable style and riveting from its opening pages, Death of an Ordinary Man is both abundantly human and marvelously transcendent, and reminds us again and again that there are no ordinary men.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/06/348/056/0063480565_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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With just a glance across a market square, somehow Sarah Perry knows: Her father-in-law, David, is a dying man. Robert, her husband, sees it too. After a life thinking of death as a moment, Perry’s perspective shifts. David lived for 77 years, she writes. And though she can’t say with certainty when his demise began, she counts from the epiphany in the market. He died for 48 days. At about 200 pages, Death of an Ordinary Man is a short memoir but a slow read—a parallel to the death it details. From diagnosis of David’s esophageal cancer to his final breath, nine days passed, each made long by the anxiety and concern Perry and Robert experienced as caregivers. They learned firsthand the intricacies of England’s National Health Service. They watched nurses come and go, experienced both care and casual disregard for their sorrow from doctors. Perry divides her recollection into three parts: Life, Death and After Life. Each section proceeds without chapter breaks. The lengthy blocks of text mimic the uncertainty of dying. You know it’s coming. You can feel the end drawing near as the stack of remaining pages thins. But you can’t yet see exactly when, or how, it will arrive. “So we’d always known we were mortal—but to know something is not necessarily to understand it,” Perry writes. “And if every day on waking we fully understood that there’s a limit set on our time, which might be either in decades or in minutes, I think we’d go mad first with wonder, then with grief.” The bestselling author of novels Enlightenment and Melmoth, Perry infuses her memories of each day of her father-in-law’s waning life with perspectives from poetry, science and philosophy. David’s death was a particular experience, but losing a loved one is a universal rite of passage. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction, Death of an Ordinary Man explores the meaning of life with a visceral account of both the physical and emotional aspects of death. Perry invites readers to commiserate and better understand the journey that awaits.