Iceberg - Softcover

Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. She wrote the introduction to Tom Lubbock's memoir Until Further Notice, I am Alive, published by Granta in 2012. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and lives in London with her son.

Deeply affecting and beautifully written. * Literary Review * A perfect piece of writing, it does justice to a terrible situation, giving it grace and even glory. -- Claire Tomalin * The Week * The most heartbreaking memoir of the year... The writing is raw with grief, and offers no pat lessons or easy answers. * Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year * Marion Coutt's memoir of her husband Tom Lubbock's last days following the diagnosis of a brain tumour is as devastating as you might expect. Yet such is the intensity and passion of her writing, it's also strangely exhilarating. * Josh Cohen, The Guardian, Books of the Year * One of the most compelling and challenging books of the year. It has the strength of an arrow: taut, spiked, quivering, working to its fatal conclusion. * The Sunday Times, Books of the Year * Harrowing but spellbinding... communicates in an original, challenging way the changes in her life after her husband, Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with a brain tumour - well deserves its acclaim. * Guardian, Books of the Year * An almost sculpted account of her and her infant son's endurance as her art critic husband died of a brain tumour: it is grand beyond words. * The Scotsman, Books of the Year * The Iceberg is a depiction of loss so raw it couldn't but melt the coldest of hearts. But Coutts is also something of an alchemist when it comes to language, her prose a uniquely beautiful landscape of emotion. * Independent, Books of the Year * Hey - want to uncontrollably weep your eyes out? Read Marion Coutts describing her husband dying of a brain tumour. * @caitlinmoran * The writing is lyrical, textured, perfectly paced; the sentences short so that we feel Coutts's moments of panic, her quickened heartbeat... [A] startlingly beautiful and inspiring pioneer text * Independent * At times so painful that it's hard to keep reading, this is nonetheless an unexpectedly reassuring book. * Books of the Year, Daily Mail * Searing, shocking, unflinching, profoundly moving. * Spectator * In writer and artist Marion Coutts' unflinching yet uplifting memoir... she becomes a chronicler of what it means to be human. * Financial Times * It is a memoir quite unlike any other. It has the strength of an arrow: taut, spiked, quavering, working to its fatal conclusion... The Iceberg is an extraordinary story told in an extraordinary way. * The Sunday Times * The Iceberg is mesmerising, harrowing and radiant. There are times when to go on reading is almost unbearable, yet it is impossible to put it down. -- Cressida Connolly * Mail on Sunday * Marion Coutts has written a fierce love letter-cum-elegy in The Iceberg... This is far more than just another book about grief. -- Marina Warner * Observer * Readers should be warned that sharing such a grief as closely as this marvellous book compels one to do is painful... This is a book that clearly had to be written... And certainly it ought to be read by anyone who ever pauses to consider our mortality. -- Diana Athill * Sunday Telegraph * Not quite like any other bereavement memoir... it reads like a huge juggernaut, its inevitable awful ending hurtling towards you at full speed from the first page. * Evening Standard * An exquisitely expressed portrait of three lives operating in the shadow of catastrophe... This is human trauma, profoundly and beautifully told. * Independent on Sunday * The book's truth is so pure and compressed, as though Coutts had condensed the coal of her experience into a diamond. Encountering it is like a near-death experience, at once traumatic and profoundly, permanently illuminating. Love itself is in these pages: not a representation of love, but love, pure and simple. The book reeks of it. * New York Times *