Ben Goldsmith’s remarkable memoir begins with his daughter, Iris, swimming into the sea to place her hands on the carcass of a humpback whale, captured by whalers off the island of Bequia in the Caribbean. The powerful image of the “teenage girl in the blood-red water unafraid, tenderly handling the dead monster” illustrates Iris’s reverence for the natural world as well as being a portent of tragedy.
In 2019, the gentle rhythm of a normal summer’s day was shattered by Iris’s death in an accident on the family farm in Somerset. Goldsmith’s world was thrown into disarray. He recounts those final, awful hours in quiet, careful prose that nevertheless lays bare their gut-wrenching agony.
