Death of an Ordinary Man

An unflinching and profoundly moving account of caring until death, from Booker-Prize-longlisted Sarah Perry

‘Please read this book. It may very well change how you live’ Rachel Clarke

‘I was spellbound’ Kathryn Mannix

Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief- it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love.

Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he’d been a healthy and happy man- he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.

Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.

‘By the end I was left shaken, deeply moved’ Christos Tsiolkas

‘This book will be a lifeline for so many people’ Sean Hewitt

‘To read this book is a privilege, a gift on the craft of dying’ Amy Key

Author Biography

Sarah Perry is the internationally best-selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstone’s Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has a PhD in Creative Writing.