“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.I've both read and listened to this very fine if sad tome and in both media the hurt and pain that Lewis feels on the death of his beloved H comes through in spades. There are many favourable reviews of this book and I can appreciate how useful this window into the human condition of grief might be to a Christian who is questioning the injustice of the death of a loved one. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago.”

As I have already noted, not every bend does. “ Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. This book is not suitable for people looking for a self-help fix to grief but some of the passages give a beautiful description that help with the understanding of the bereavement process. It was also comforting to realise that even a great literary genius struggles to articulate the experience of grief. What I liked: I liked the raw human emotion which is written in all its chaos and confusion and which clearly illustrates the fact that there are no set stages for grief and which instead describes the muddled illogical process that lacks a timetable. Nevertheless, I appreciate how the book could be helpful to others who might question their own religious beliefs after the death of a loved one. Instead, I found the book to be more a series of grief notes with a strong emphasis on faith that, for someone like me without such a strong belief, felt a bit of a distraction and made the book hard going at times.

What I wanted: I wanted a love story that would help me to release tears and embrace my own feelings of loss and grief and show me the emotions of shock, guilt and pain felt by others. The surprisingly brief book inspired the movie “Shadowlands”, which is based on the relationship between Lewis and his American poet wife. The book, divided into four parts, documents the scattered thoughts of the author’s evolving state of mind and it questions whether it is possible to return to normality after grief. The Amazon reviews recommend this book for anyone who has faith and has lost someone anyone who has lost someone and ponders faith and anyone who is not sure how to navigate the storms of grief.

Although it was republished after Lewis’ death in his own name, the book still refers to his wife as “H”. Clerk, so Lewis could avoid being identified as the author. The book was first published under the pseudonym N. As a man of words, he wrote down his feelings of anguish and reflections on his bereavement as they happened, which are now contained in this small book.

After only four years of marriage to Joy Davidman, Lewis’s wife sadly died of cancer and he found himself alone, inconsolable in his grief and struggling to sustain his faith.

A grief observed amazon