Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Death & Grief

In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life, Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge "into the darkness of an expiring existence". Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom's intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer's, and then on becoming a widow.

It's New Year's Eve of 1999 when four teenagers working late are attacked at a Blockbuster video store in New Jersey. Only one inexplicably survives. Police quickly identify a suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, who flees and is never seen again. Fifteen years later, four more teenagers are attacked at an ice cream store in the same town, and again only one makes it out alive. In the aftermath of the latest crime, three lives intersect: the lone survivor of the Blockbuster massacre, the brother of the fugitive accused and FBI agent Sarah Keller.

Award-winning journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has spent her career reporting on abuse that happens under the cover of ‘private life'. And yet the story of her own troubled family is one she has always kept locked away. Snyder was eight when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious against this life, she was expelled from school, and then from home. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, she soon found herself masquerading as an adult.

1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box.

Nicole Jameson has always been proud of her husband, Ethan. He's built a successful career in finance, and his employers, the Harrisons, treat them like family. They're a firm who look after their own, and even gave a loan to the company chauffeur, Conrad, to fund his pilot licence. When the two men are returning from a business trip, the worst possible thing happens—their plane crashes into the sea. No survivors are expected to be found. Nicole is heartbroken, much like Conrad's wife, Ania. She never warmed to Nicole, but now they share a bond of grief.

Recently widowed, Winnie, 84, was in need of some companionship. Someone to help with the weekly food shop and offer tips on the crossword. Ben, 34, was looking for a new housemate. As the UK was locked down in 2020, Ben and Winnie's lives interwove, forming an unlikely friendship, where lessons were learnt (heat the red wine in the oven with the plates, preserve or pickle whatever you can, never throw anything away) and grief, both personal and that of a nation, was explored.

1981. Khalid Quraishi is one of the lucky ones. He works nights in the glitzy West End, and comes home every morning to his beautiful wife and daughter. He's a world away from Karachi and the family he left behind. But Khalid likes to gamble, and he likes to win. Twenty pounds on the fruit machine, fifty on a sure-thing horse, a thousand on an investment that seems certain to pay out. Now he's been offered a huge opportunity, a chance to get in early with a new bank, and it looks like he'll finally have his big win.

The Chamberlain family - Charlie and Daphne and their children Laura, Scott and Nick - had fantastic summer holidays when they were young. But then, inevitably, the children grew up, and their own messy lives got in the way. Since their mum died, it feels to them all as if their family just isn't that close any more. And Charlie fears his kids have all lost their direction. For his 80th birthday, all Charlie wants is to bring his family together again - and by some miracle, they've all said yes. It's only 10 days...how hard can it be?

Simon Thomas (former Blue Peter presenter and, for so long, the face of Sky Sports Football) reveals how grief nearly destroyed him in his heart-breaking memoir. When Simon lost the woman he had loved for 16 years, the future he'd imagined for their happy family disappeared for ever. Gemma died from acute myeloid leukaemia, just three days after being diagnosed. In Love, Interrupted, Simon is brutally honest about his journey through grief, and opens up about how close he came to ending his own life.

In the summer of 1990, Cathy's brother, Matty, was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out, two weeks before receiving his GCSE results. Sitting by his unconscious body in hospital, holding his hand and watching his heartbeat on the monitors, Cathy and her parents willed him to survive. They did not know then that there are many fates worse than death.

After a near fatal stroke in 1995, Robert McCrum has gained an intimate understanding of his own mortality. Twenty-two years on, his friends have joined him in experiencing Prospero's 'every third thought' of death as a dominating theme of life. McCrum asks: can we make peace with what Freud calls 'the necessity of dying'? Searching for answers leads him to brain surgeons, psychologists, cancer patients and writers for advice and wisdom.

London, 1940. A woman lies dead in a bombed-out house. It looks like she's another tragic casualty of the Blitz, until police pathologist Aleck Northcote proves she was strangled and placed at the scene. But Northcote himself has something to hide. And when his past catches up with him, he, too, is murdered. Tewkesbury, 2020. Beneath the vast stone arches of Tewkesbury Abbey, a man has been fatally stabbed. He is Roddy March, an investigative journalist for a podcast series uncovering miscarriages of justice. 

From the sublime (the faint sound of Mozart as you take your last breath) to the ridiculous (lessons on how to close the sagging jaw of a corpse), Tisdale leads the listener through the peaks and troughs of death with a calm, wise and humorous hand. More than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible, this is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions and literature around the world. 

Katharine Smyth was a student when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favourite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of understanding her own grief. Smyth's story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf's Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss and homecoming. 

When Henry Scowcroft's partner, Zarah, was diagnosed with stage-four bladder cancer in 2016, their world fell apart. An award-winning science writer for Cancer Research UK, Henry had spent 14 years at the coal-face of cancer research, but now the disease had infiltrated his personal life too. Henry uses this unique perspective to tell the story of Zarah's illness, how he tried in vain to use everything he'd learnt in his professional career to try to save her and in doing so, how he realised that even a career writing about cancer daily isn't enough preparation for what comes next.

When Hamed Amiri was 10 years old, he watched his mother give a speech in his home town of Herat, Afghanistan, speaking out for women’s rights and education and against the ruling Taliban. That night, an order was given for her execution. The family packed up their most precious belongings and escaped in darkness, starting what would be a long and dangerous journey. But his mother's was not the only life in danger. Hamed’s older brother suffered from a rare heart condition, and this escape offered a chance of life-saving treatment in the West. 

Thirty-eight-year-old lawyer Audrey is tired of not being seen. Not seen by her mother, who always preferred her golden brother. By her sleazy boss, who works her like a dog. By her self-obsessed colleagues, who want her to help them fix their lives without any acknowledgement of her own. Her social life consists of late nights in the office, visits to her ageing parents, trivia nights with a group of relative strangers, and evenings at home with her pet rabbit Joni. One night, unable to get the attention of the bartender in her local, she walks out without paying for her wine.

Kelsey Parker's world was turned upside down in the summer of 2020 when her husband Tom, singer in boyband The Wanted, was cruelly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Heavily pregnant with their second child and coping with her own heartache at losing her partner of 13 years, Kelsey remained a tower of strength and positivity for Tom during his darkest days. When traditional treatments stopped working, she spent hours researching alternative therapies to give her husband extra time with his young children Aurelia and Bodhi.

On the August bank holiday weekend in 1979, 14-year-old Timothy Knatchbull went out on a boat trip off the shore of Mullaghmore in County Sligo, Ireland. It was a trip that would cost four lives—and change his own forever. The IRA bomb that exploded in their boat killed Knatchbull's grandfather Lord Mountbatten, his grandmother Lady Brabourne, his twin brother Nicholas, and local teenager Paul Maxwell. In telling this story, Knatchbull is not only revisiting the terrible events he and his family lived through, but also writing an intensely personal account of human triumph over tragedy.

A remarkably powerful yet heart-warming story, Being with Cows pays homage to Life's unending compassion and insistence that in the very centre of all things, lies pure and untainted simplicity. Through a deeply tangible sense of gratitude, it tells of how tragedy can be overcome through the healing power of nature.