Will This House Last Forever?: 'Heartbreaking, beautifully written' The Times

Will This House Last Forever? is a heartfelt and original memoir about the pain of having to come to terms with a parent's mortality, the way grief defies logic, and learning to see the flaws in those we love and let them go.

Format: Hardback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 24 June 2021
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group

Evening Standard Books of the Summer

Poignant, written with intelligence and tears, Ben Okri's Nuanced, absorbing, and moving; extraordinary. Observer. Raw, poetic, beautifully formed, Daisy Johnson. When Xanthi Barker's father died when she was in her mid-twenties, she could make no sense of her grief for a man who had been absent for most of her life. Her father, poet Sebastian Barker, had left Xanthi, her mother, and her brother to pursue writing and a new relationship, when Xanthi was a baby. Growing up, she had always struggled to reconcile his extravagant affection—a rocking horse crafted from scavenged wood, the endless stream of poems, drawings, and letters, conversations that spiralled from the structure of starlight to philosophy to Bruce Springsteen—with the fact that he could not be depended upon for more everyday things. Though theirs was a relationship defined by departures, he always returned, so why should this farewell be any different, or more final?

WILL THIS HOUSE LAST FOREVER? is a heartfelt and wholly original memoir about the pain of having to come to terms with a parent's mortality, the way grief so utterly defies logic, and about learning to see the flaws in those that we love, and let them go.

Weight: 468g
Dimension: 147 x 222 x 35 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472274441