＊亚马逊4.5颗星
＊Goodreads 1600多人，将近4.5颗星
＊英国销量超过10万册！
 
1990年的夏天，凯西的弟弟麦堤晚上回家途中出了车祸。两周后，麦堤的中等教育证书成绩公布了，他是全校第一名。凯西和父母只能握着已经失去意识的麦堤，看着生命维持系统上的心电图跳动，盼望着奇迹出现。他们当时并不知道，原来，比起死亡，命运还能更捉弄人。
 
这是凯西和弟弟的故事，那场意外改变了一切。凯西和她的父母，在意外发生八年后，做了一个意想不到的决定。这本书所讲述的故事，令人心痛和动容。任何曾经看着自己心爱的人受折磨或曾失去所爱之人的人，都一定会非常喜欢这本书，这些痛苦和难过的事永远改变了身边的人。作者凯西用毫不保留的爱与温暖，发自内心的讲述这个令人心碎却鼓励人的故事，她自己的故事。她让我们知道他与家人经历了哪些事，为了爱，我们要付出的代价。love.
 
作者的另一本好书：《心痛手册》A Manual for Heartache（http://www.peonyrights.com/jiantishuji/xinling_ziwoqif/2017/0309/2333.html）
 
本书好评
‘Beautiful, devastating and ultimately uplifting, intimate and universal all at once . . . Cathy Rentzenbrink has found a way to express the things that all of us wrestle with at times – knowing how to live and taking the risk to love; facing what has damaged us, and owning it as much as a person can’
Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist
 
‘This is a brilliant book. Harrowing and heartbreaking, but also warm and human and healing. It is about a rare kind of tragedy, but feels universal, as it is about love and loss and how we learn to live, in the face of what life throws at us. You may well cry, but you will feel better for having read it, which you absolutely must. A triumph of love’
Matt Haig, author of Reasons to Stay Alive
 
‘Brilliant.  Moving, warm, agonising, unputdownable.  One of the best memoirs I've read’
Sophie Hannah 
 
‘This is a touching and brave book, heartbreaking yet beautiful’
S J Watson
 
‘This lovely, tender, painful book speaks for anyone who has suffered loss, on a scale from minor to cataclysmic . . . which pretty well means us all’
Deborah Moggach
 
‘Extraordinary . . . An honest, heartbreaking, uplifting account of family tragedy.  Read it.’
Jojo Moyes
 
‘I never knew a story of grief could have so much joy in it’
Nina Stibbe
 
‘Devastatingly honest and heartbreakingly raw, The Last Act of Love is not simply a book about grief or love or a family’s unstinting hope to do the best for their son and brother. It’s a book about courage. About the courage to face reality even at its most bleak. And for all the book’s sadness it is, ultimately, a book about hope: about how even the darkest tunnels have a glimmer of light beckoning you at the other end. I defy anyone not to be moved by this remarkable and brave story’
Hannah Beckerman, author of The Dead Wife’s Handbook
 
‘Incredibly powerful . . . The love that wraps itself around the pain and never goes away is what kept me turning the pages so quickly’
Rebecca Wait, author of The View on the Way Down
 
‘This is not only an unflinching and powerfully told account of an unimaginably painful family tragedy.  It is also an unforgettable meditation on a close sibling relationship, on growing up with grief, on life, love and everything in between.  I am in awe of how Cathy has managed to write so bravely and beautifully of something so devastating, and forge such a positive affirmation of familial love from such desperately bleak circumstances’
The Bookseller
 
‘There are only two ways that this book will be read: devoured in the middle of the night in one sitting, or eked out, only a few pages a day, because the feelings it prompts are simply too intense.  Either way, it will both stick with you and have you grabbing the forearm of whoever asks you what to read next intensely, so they know how great this is.  Cathy Rentzenbrink’s brother was hit by a car two weeks before his GCSEs and never woke up.  But it was eight years before he died.  This sounds as if it’s a book about death, or grief, but it’s really a gobsmacking memoir about family, and love.  Truly, it will inspire you to be your very best self for a long time after the final page’
The Debrief
 
‘Profoundly moving . . . This memoir is deeply affecting, I spent the last third of it in almost constant tears.  The book’s real power lies in Rentzenbrink’s skill as a writer, her ability to unearth precise and agonising details quietly, with no self-pity or drama . . . her recall is devastating . . . Sometimes, one small moment seems to contain the entirety of the agony . . . it falls into a tradition of beautifully written accounts of grief, such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking . . . Rentzenbrink unearths the profound truths of human experience: how we love, intensely, bravely, even though doing so can destroy us; how we must face what has damaged us and seek a way to live with it; how we can survive unthinkable pain and eventually, slowly, mend – without forgetting – and find contentment . . . Rentzenbrink offers a message of enormous hope for anybody who is going through loss, grief or trauma . . . She emerges from this unflinching memoir with dignity, strength and an enormous heart.  This is not an easy book, but it is a thoughtful, honest one, that brings deep rewards’
Sunday Times
 
‘Profoundly moving . . . It is a great achievement to transform such a terrible story – one of a kind with which, as a neurosurgeon, I am painfully familiar – into something rather beautiful and uplifting . . . This book should be read by everybody who has either personal or professional experience of severe head injury and, indeed, by anybody who is concerned by the way our society has such difficulty in accepting that meaningful life is about more than just a beating heart’
Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm, in the New Statesman
 
‘Although there is pain on every page, this love letter to a beloved sibling is richly rewarding’
Sunday Mirror
 
‘Extraordinary . . . beautifully written . . . Rentzenbrink brings an authenticity to the genre’
The Times  
 
‘Emotionally raw and unflinchingly honest . . . incredible insight and humanity . . . deeply moving . . . What makes The Last Act of Love so special, so readable and ultimately so uplifting is that it is a book as much about courage and hope as it is about loss . . . It will almost certainly make you cry.  But once the book has broken your heart, Rentzenbrink will gently, gradually piece it back together for you again, leaving you with an undeniable sense of the indomitability of the human spirit’
Hannah Beckerman, Sunday Express
 
‘Her story is a life-affirming act of love . . . devastating . . . heartbreaking . . . the misery is offset by warmth and gentle humour . . . The mutual sibling affection is so authentic that when the tragedy comes 17 pages in, it punches us in the gut . . . Emotional honesty is essential for memoir writing, and there is a lot of it here . . . uplifting . . . This is a book you would want to re-read, during a tough time, to make you feel less alone . . . lucid and warm . . . feels strangely nourishing to read.  Which you absolutely should.  The book itself feels an act of love’
Matt Haig, Observer
 
‘Terrifically moving’ 
Sunday Times – a top choice for the best books to read this summer
 
‘Brilliant, moving . . .  her story is not maudlin, still less mawkish. Indeed, in many ways it is heartening and funny . . . Rentzenbrink does not wail at the injustice of it.  Her book is bigger than that . . . Rentzenbrink writes beautifully . . . But the book has a happy ending, in fact it’s a happy ending in itself’
Daily Mail
 
‘How do you copy when a fate worse than death befalls the person you love most in the world? . . . I sobbed buckets . . . marvelled at her bravery and stoicism throughout.  Cathy tells a devastating tale in clear-eyed, matter-of-fact prose.  There is no melodrama and no self-pity as she struggles to live with a catastrophe that could befall any of us . . . The Last Act of Love is surely the bravest, most moving book you will read this year’
Daily Express
 
‘A beautiful and brave exploration of the complex heartbreak of a long goodbye’
Good Housekeeping
 
‘Searingly honest . . . a book in which love and hope shine through’
Independent
 
‘Her tone is warm and the book brims with insights. Grief, anger and guilt loom large, certainly – but the dominant emotion is love’
Financial Times
 
‘A heart-breaking memoir . . . It is sad but never depressing and ultimately inspiring’
Damien Barr, Guardian Books of the Year
 
‘My non-fiction book of the year . . . heartbreaking . . . life-affirming’
Sarra Manning, Red
 
‘I put down Cathy Rentzenbrink’s heartbreaking memoir about love, grief, denial and courage, a different person than when I started it’
Sam Baker, The Pool
‘Harrowing’
Express Books of the Year
 
‘Extraordinary . . . raw and poignant’
The Times
 
关于作者
Cathy Rentzenbrink在Cornwall，在Yorkshire长大，现在住在伦敦，是一位作家和记者。