Winner of the Wellcome Prize A finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Award A memoir quite unlike any other. It has the strength of an arrow: taut, spiked, quavering, working to its fatal conclusion...an extraordinary story told in an extraordinary way.”The Sunday Times The most heartbreaking memoir of the year.”Independent on Sunday Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, and finalist for every major nonfiction award in the UK, including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Award, The Iceberg is artist and writer Marion Coutts’ astonishing memoir; an adventure of being and dying and a compelling, poetic meditation on family, love, and language. In 2008, Tom Lubbach, the chief art critic for The Independent was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The Iceberg is his wife, Marion Coutts’, fierce, exquisite account of the two years leading up to his death. In spare, breathtaking prose, Coutts conveys the intolerable and, alongside their two year old son Evwhose language is developing as Tom’s is disappearingMarion and Tom lovingly weather the storm together. In short bursts of exquisitely textured prose, The Iceberg becomes a singular work of art and an uplifting and universal story of endurance in the face of loss.

The Iceberg: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Coutts, Marion

Arts & Literature

Grove Press/ Black Cat

The Iceberg is an account of the eighteen months leading up to the author's husband’s death and asks us how we witness and experience death along with celebrating love, family, language, art, and life. In 2008 Marion Coutts’ partner, the art critic Tom Lubbock, was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was located in the area controlling speech and language. It would eventually rob him of the ability to speak and ultimately took his life in early 2011. In short bursts of beautiful, textured prose, Coutts describes a man, a woman, and a young child under assault, and how the three of them fight to keep their family unit intact. Written with extraordinary narrative force and power, The Iceberg is almost shocking in its raw honesty and the beauty of its sentences. It charts the deterioration of Tom’s speech even as it records the developing language of his child. Fury, selfishness, grief, indignity, and impotence are all examined and brought to light. Yet out of this comes a rare story about belonging along with an adventure of being and dying.

Atavist Books

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Books by Coutts, Marion

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coutts, Marion. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Iceberg: A Memoir

The Iceberg: A Memoir