In Love : A Memoir of Love and Loss

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize for Non-Fiction 2023New York Times BestsellerA poignant love letter to Bloom’s husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.

In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge ‘into the darkness of an expiring existence’. Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom’s intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer’s, and then on becoming a widow. It charts the anxiety and pain of the process that led them to Dignitas, while never avoiding the complex ethical problems that are raised by assisted death.

‘Poignant, kind, funny and ultimately redemptive’ – Alain de Botton, author of The Course of Love’In Love is a thrillingly beautiful, laser-eyed book about love, life, mortality and, most remarkably, about the ways in which no one of the three can be separated from the others’ – Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and A Home at the End of the World