This book will be released on October 1st 2026.
Pre-orders are charged at time of order and the book will be posted to you as soon as it becomes available.
UK postage is 99 pence per order.
Introduced by Jasmine Donahaye
Several months after the death of poet Dannie Abse’s wife, Joan, in a car accident, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.
Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff in 1923. He began his medical studies at the Welsh National School of Medicine and qualified as a doctor from Westminster Hospital, London in 1950. While still a student his first book of poems was published and his first play performed. Further poetry volumes followed over the decades, culminating in his TS Eliot Prize shortlisted final collection Speak, Old Parrot in 2013 and Ask the Moon: New and Collected Poems 1948-2014. His first novel, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, appeared in 1954 and his most recent, the Booker longlisted The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas in 2002. His three prize-winning plays were collected in The View from Row G (1990) and his autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, was published in 2001. Recognised internationally as a poet, Dannie Abse was President of the Poetry Society and of the Welsh Academy of Letters, and among his awards were the Wales Book of the Year for The Presence, the Wilfred Owen Award and the Roland Mathias Prize. He was appointed a CBE in 2012. Dannie Abse died in September 2014.