The Red of my Blood

Clover Stroud is a fearless explorer of the human heart, and a writer of incomparable grace and passion. She also understands more about loss, sorrow, grief, and resilience than most people will ever have to learn. She is a gift, and so is her work.

Elizabeth Gilbert

A miracle of a book. A hope of a book. An absolute gutting masterpiece of a book so that it transcends book and becomes a record of life, a symphony of love and all the pain that must be endured to hear that kind of glittering gorgeous love. A must read for anyone with a soul.

Lisa Taddeo

This brilliant book is beautiful without being pretty; it's a gut punch, a cry from the heart on behalf of everyone who has been unmade by the death of a loved one.

Sophie Heawood

The most beautiful, enduring, indelible, transcendent love letter from a sister to a sister that I will ever read: this is a book that speaks to anyone for whom shared experience, wisdom, laughter and mutual love for one another has occupied the core of existence. Light in darkness...what more can we possibly ask for in life?... yet this is the shining beacon that Clover Stroud holds out to us in her astonishing book.

Juliet Nicolson

So beautiful, compelling and raw. Clover records the shifting, glittering rainbow of her experience of love and death with extraordinary honesty and precision.

Gavanndra Hodge

A viscerally intense and raw memoir of grief - honest, questioning, furious, heartbroken - this book will stay with me for a very long time.

Lucy Atkins

Stroud, like CS Lewis and Joan Didion before her, shares the excruciating love story that is grief with a visceral immediacy. I read it in a day and felt both forewarned and unexpectedly warmed by the gales of love in her loss.

Kate Spicer

A gripping, shimmering testament to the deep love between sisters, and the preciousness of life itself. Heartbreaking, beautiful, I loved it.

Eve Chase, author of The Glass House

A sister's love - unforgettable, by its telling. This is a clear sighted gaze at those brave, beautiful heartbreaking moments that find us, standing, in life, intimately close to deaths presence, and trusting that a full life exists and continues, ahead, through and beyond our imagining, and love.

Tamsin Calidas

Shameless and so audaciously, viscerally precise that it sends shivers down your spine. This is very sad in places but it's also triumphant, joyous and what's most triumphant is it's not really a book about death at all, but about life and about love, most of all love. I'm in awe.

Julie Myerson

Clover Stroud's song of sorrow for the death of her beloved sister: an extraordinary obituary of love, and a testament to life amid all its griefs.

Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller: EDITOR'S CHOICE

I have read The Red of My Blood with awe. It really is exceptional. It shoots so high and far, and yet comes up so close. The blazing directness is inspiring. So is the encircling, real, emblematic landscape. And I caught my breath at some apparently tiny, corner-of-the-eye oblique moments. It is so really rich and really true. And only Clover could have written it.

Susanna Clapp

'The Red of My Blood touched me deeply. It is such a powerful, honest, and passionate book - an immersion into the very essence of love and connection. I went on the journey with you, into the dark and fearful places, the knife that cut you - God I felt that! and out into a new way of seeing the world, and accepting it. I know it's not over, or ever will be... but what a fiery start!'

Esther Freud

Amazing. Brilliantly written, it throws you right into the furnace of grief. It is pure emotion and what drives it is not only love but the energy of rage. I have never read anything which is written with such glorious fury.

James Runcie

Clover writes with visceral honesty about the lived experience of her grief for her sister Nell - in all its hues; moving swiftly between darkness and light whilst her love for Nell remains powerfully alive and present.

Julia Samuel

Clover Stroud articulates loss so beautifully- without a shred of sentimentality or self-indulgence.

Hannah Rothschild

Clover's writing is sensationally beautiful and so quick with life in the face of utter bereavement as to be almost a resurrection in itself. She is as golden as her sister clearly was.

Laura Cumming, author of On Chapel Sands

The Red of my Blood is one of the most haunting, gripping books I've read in recent memory. Stroud's writing about overwhelming loss is knife-sharp, beautiful, and profound. This is a masterful memoir, which will echo with its readers for a long time.

Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles and Circe

I am reeling from the beauty and blazing honesty of The Red of My Blood. What a brave, golden and unflinching piece of writing. It transcends the personal and shines its light not only on the devastation of loss and grief, but the (sometimes unwanted) process of living inside and beside it.

Rachel Joyce

A beautiful, powerful and spell-binding book about the meaning of death, life, loss and love, and above all sisterhood, in all its frightening wonder. There is something so instinctively raw and yet lyrical about the way Clover Stroud writes, because everything she writes comes from her heart. I felt the power and colour of every word seep into my skin. I shan't forget this book.

Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love and How We Met: a memoir of love and other misadventures

With brutal, beautiful honesty, Clover articulates how bereavement shocks and dislocates - and in all the pain, there's SO much life.

Marian Keyes

I love Clover Stroud's writing. It feels like she's mining for treasure, drilling down with lyrical prose, getting to the thing that makes us human. That this book about death and grief is so life-affirming is a testament to her talent.

Christie Watson

Clover is fearless in her quest to write about how life really feels.

Liz Earle: Wellbeing

Like a magician, she puts her grief into a hat and pulls out 70,000 perfect words to describe what it is like when language fails you. Courageous and utterly compelling, this is a book that will wring you out, wear you down and leave you filled with wonder.

Francis Wilson, The Oldie

[Clover Stroud is] a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life's horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on.

Ysenda Maxstone Graham, Spectator

What makes The Red of My Blood so memorable is Stroud's Proustian attention to colour, smell and sound ... a beautiful addition to the literature of loss. It will serve as a lit match, to be passed from one person to the next in the darkest moments.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times

Stroud's beautiful new memoir, The Red of My Blood, is studded with agonising moments ... This is a colourful blast of feeling that picks up on the hallucinogenic oddness of grief, along with the importance of honouring death as an unavoidable part of life.

Gwendolyn Smith, i newspaper

A howl of love and rage. It is an elegy of outstanding beauty.

Rebecca Armstrong, i newspaper

The beauty of Clover's book is that there is no neat ending, just as in death there so often isn't. What's left, however messy, is the search for a different way of living

Gaby Hinsliff, Guardian

A beautiful book. I loved every word.

Fearne Cotton, Happy Place Podcast