Vintage Classics: Sleeping Letters

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

'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