YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING THE PB

From one of America's iconic writers | a portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.Several days before Christmas 2003 | John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter | Quintana | fall ill. At first they thought it was flu | then pneumonia | then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve –the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second | this close | symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later | their daughter pulled through. Two months after that | arriving at LA airport | she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Centre to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion’s ‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death | about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity | about life itself’. The result is an exploration of an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage | and a life | in good times and bad.