Sleeping Letters

A unique, intimate and beautiful exploration of grief, loss, healing and faith – as Marie-Elsa Bragg looks back on her mother’s suicide, that happened when she was just a young girl

A unique, intimate and beautiful exploration of grief, loss, healing and faith

‘This is a beautiful book, a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance. You have to read it’ EDMUND DE WAAL

We sat in the kitchen across the small wooden table from each other. She cried like banks bursting, then silence; like winds blowing through her shoulders, chest bouncing, then long shallow breaths. She ruptured and I watched, still, emotionless. ‘You must stop crying.’

When Marie-Elsa was just six years old, her mother took her own life. Now, many years later, she returns to that night. Going back to that moment, inhabiting this defining tragedy, allows for an exploration of the grief but also brings healing.

Written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa’s own faith. It is an unforgettable book, with a luminous sense of a daughter’s loss.

With a Foreword by Rowan Williams

‘Truly remarkable… This book carries its readers to a place where inhibitions and fears about loss and death give way to something more hopeful and, in their own way, real’ Daily Telegraph

Author Biography

Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is half French, half Cumbrian and was brought up in London. She studied Philosophy and Theology at the University of Oxford, and trained for the Priesthood at Ripon College Cuddesdon. She is a Priest in the diocese of London, an Ignatian spiritual director, a therapist and a Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey. Her first novel, Towards Mellbreak, was published in 2017.