The Elements

What does it mean to become a widow at 35?

In her mid-thirties Kat Lister lost her husband to brain cancer. After five years of being a wife and one of being a carer, in love and in and out of hospitals, she became a widow.

In the year following his death Kat seeks refuge in stories of grief and widowhood, but struggles to find a language that can make sense of her experience and the physicality of bereavement. Instead, she turns to the elements – fire, water, earth, air – on her quest to come to terms with her grief, to inhabit her body again, and to find out who she is now.

The Elements is a story of love, pain, hope and, ultimately, transformation.

'Powerful, humane and deeply affecting.' Sali Hughes

'A moving, bruising and meditative memoir and love story ... Beautifully written, The Elements, will strike a chord with anyone who's been touched by grief.' ? Red Magazine

'A staggering book. Kat writes with such hypnotic lyricism.' -- Terri White

'A stunning and immersive examination of grief; of making a new future; the body as a site of "wrongness" and "re-entry" after bereavement ... it veers from melancholy to rage and joy.' -- Sinéad Gleeson

'Strikingly honest' -- Sarah Ditum ? The Times