Alexandra Fuller: Fi, Vintage, paperback, 9781529931624

Alexandra Fuller previous memoirs, about her eccentric parents, her upbringing in Zimbabwe and Zambia in the turmoil of independence wars and then moving to Wyoming with her husband becoming a parent herself, her homesickness for Africa sit on my shelf of favorite books. She is an extraordinaryly talented writer and a very complex person. 

 Her latest book "Fi" however needs a category of its own. Fuller describes the unthinkable, the totally unexpected death of her 21 year old son Fi, what it does to her and  her two girls overnight, fracturing her relationships and the bottomless pit of grief she falls into. It is a brutally honest, exceptional book about a terrible year, mostly  heartbreaking but in the end also uplifting, written in her very unique voice.