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For our first Books & Ideas event of 2025, Join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, in conversation with Jason Steger, to discuss her profoundly moving new memoir Memorial Days – a chronicle of heartbreak and the journey beyond losing someone you love. This captivating conversation will take place over an intimate two-course dinner in The Restaurant at Montalto.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents Geraldine Brooks and partner Tony Horwitz relocated from Australia to the idyllic Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, USA, to raise their children.
The life they built there was one of meaningful work, good humour and tenderness. But all this ended abruptly when, during the Spring of 2019, Brooks received a phone call with the news that Horwitz – just 60 years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – had collapsed and died on a street in Washington, DC.
In the aftermath of this devastating loss, Brooks composed the spare and heartfelt Memorial Days – a portrait of a timeless love between souls that captures the joy, agony and mystery of life.
A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toward peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony and mystery of life.
Geraldine Brooks is the author of six novels, including Horse, People of the Book, Year of Wonders, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March. She has also written acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her writing has been translated into over 25 languages and has collectively sold millions of copies around the world. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks now divides her time between Sydney and Martha’s Vineyard.
