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: Paperback / softback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 07 April 2022
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: 254g
Dimension: 129 x 196 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472274489