A blazingly beautiful memoir… A glimmer of hope in the dark.

A beacon of hope in a dark world

An astonishing feat… I defy anyone not to shed tears at least once when reading this book.

A book of exceptional grace...the most extraordinary account of an emotional journey

An extraordinary read, honest, intimate and lightly poetic. It is a testament of love, loss and grief and also the often untold story of those who are left behind and must find a way to go on

A book for our times

Defiant and powerful...Leiris shows us, poignantly and movingly, how the absence of Helene opens up for him and his son.

Incredible, informative, very powerful… Beautifully written… I felt so touched by it and changed by it, so I thank you for writing it. I hope it finds a huge audience. I can’t recommend it highly enough… A beautiful piece of work

One of the most enduring and memorable messages after the deadly attack on Paris's Bataclan theater was written by journalist Antoine Leiris. This bracing, courageous, and utterly beautiful book shows us that he had much more to say

The man whose words have inspired millions.

An extraordinarily moving book

Tissues at the ready, because though this book be little, it is FIERCE… No fluff. No forgiveness. No forgetting. I read it in one brief sitting, lying in the bath, tears dripping into the water.

This is a soliloquy not only on grief but on love, a raw but controlled cry of fury and defiance against a senseless killing, and a touching addition to the rich tradition of writing about loss.

Poignant

It is simple and immediate, and is all about love and loss… an astonishing feat

Very intimate and full of love

I am impressed by his responsiveness, the nuanced intelligence with which he speaks.

Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word

What he makes me see is how the personal is a possession and that this is especially true for everyone involved in the Bataclan tragedy because the personal was – and still is – in danger of being swamped by the public story of international terrorism.

He had deliberately retreated from the world that was talking incessantly about the slaughter… If Antoine refused to give his hate to the men who killed his wife and so many others, he also refuses to give them space in his life and that of his now two-year-old son.

He looked at the words on the screen as the news networks competed to find words to describe the events: massacre, carnage, bloodbath. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t because of Melvil… Initially resistant to spending time with fellow mourners, Antoine discovered that there is a kind of brotherhood, a feeling of recognition, that can provide consolation.

[A] beautifully written memoir… It’s the hardest book you can pick up this year, but also the most affecting.

It is a personal account of the aftershock following the atrocity. Yet there is no gore, no torture, no scene-setting, no facts putting the Isis-claimed retaliation in context, no second-hand reports of what happened inside the theatre… Instead, it is simple and immediate, and is all about love and loss… This book may also be Leiris’s way of just holding it together. One feels he is writing as the man he was before that November day that changed everything… It is the literary equivalent of smelling her clothes every night before attempting to sleep.

A book for our times.

This book is a love song to Hélène, a promise to Melvil and a resolution not to be defeated by chaos and barbarity. It is a stunning mission statement.

This heartbreaking and beautifully written memoir lays bare the terrible chronology of grief, but it is also a testimony to the power of love and hope.

It’s an agonising account of those first few days, in which the lives of father and son changed forever. Despite the haste with which it was written, every word is chosen with care and charged with meaning, a raw and honest memoir of grief which can’t fail to move all who read it.