It's the middle of the summer before her fiftieth birthday and Alexandra is just barely hanging on. Grieving her father, chafing and straining against the stresses and strictures of midlife as a mother and ex-wife, and piecing her way through a disastrous relationship with a younger woman that lurches and buckles, but never quite breaks.

And then - suddenly and incomprehensibly - her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep.

What happens next is what Alexandra details in these pages. By turns disarming and honest, devastating and (unexpectedly, blessedly) funny, she recounts the painstaking work of grieving a child, stumbling away from and back to the family that remains, letting go and, ultimately, staying alive