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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 Lubbock, 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 Ev - whose language is developing as Tom's is disappearing - Marion 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.
"Starred Review. Riveting...poignant memoir...A poetic and moving chronicle of loss." - Kirkus
"Profoundly moving...the intertwining journeys of father and son make this intricate tale of life and death all the more powerful...exquisite." - Publishers Weekly
"An extraordinary memoir... one of the most astonishing books. I was transfixed by it. [Coutts'] work is marvelously wrought and quite experimental, yet says very blunt things." - Guernica
"A fierce love letter-cum-elegy... This is far more than just another book about grief." - The Observer (UK)
"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." - Sunday Times (UK)
"The most heartbreaking memoir of the year." - Independent on Sunday (UK)
"A book that clearly had to be written...to be read by anyone who ever pauses to consider our mortality." - The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"The Iceberg is mesmerizing, harrowing, and radiant... it is impossible to put it down." - Daily Mail (UK)
"Unflinching yet uplifting...[Coutts is] a chronicler of what it means to be human." - Financial Times (UK)
"The writing is lyrical, textured, perfectly paced; the sentences short so that we feel Coutts's moments of panic, her quickened heartbeat... [A] startlingly beautiful and inspiring pioneer text." - The Independent (UK)
"[Coutts] chooses her words with such beautiful scrupulousness, never twisting or turning the knife of her story to exact our pity or admiration; her thought is like sensation, her descriptions of feeling are often like notes for a visual work... Her book is a homage to an exceptional man; it's also the work of an exceptional woman artist." - The Guardian (UK)
"Extraordinary... Not quite like any other bereavement memoir." - The Evening Standard (UK)
"Searing, shocking, unflinching, profoundly moving." - The Spectator (UK)
"Marion Coutts' account of living with her husband's illness and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed. Reading it, you have the sense of something truly unique being brought into the world – it stays with you for a long time after." - Bill Bryson (Wellcome Prize citation)
This information about The Iceberg was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. She works in sculpture, film and video and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including the Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and the Wellcome Collection, London. She has held fellowships at Kettle¹s Yard, Cambridge and Tate Liverpool. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. She lives in London with her son. This is her first book.
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