Epilogue

Reviews / Votes

Epilogue is so very good. Each tiny piece of this story is so sweet and heartbreaking I couldn't stop reading it. It's brilliant. It will make you cry. I have never met Will Boast, but I'm so proud of him -- Nina Stibbe, author * Love, Nina * Riveting, soulful, and courageously told, Will Boast's memoir is a gorgeous meditation on grief and family and also a deeply personal account of his coming-of-age under a relentless bombardment of tragedies and revelations. Never has a story of loss been so full of life -- Maggie Shipstead, author * Seating Arrangements * Elegiac and unsentimental, Epilogue is a moving meditation on the enduring mysteries of family, the surprising possibilities of loss, and the deep resilience of an individual. With piercing clarity and wisdom, Will Boast reveals the unexpected within the unthinkable -- Jennifer duBois, author * Cartwheel * A brave, brilliant, masterfully crafted story about an ordinary family's extraordinary collision of tragedies and secrets... One of the most moving and transformative reading experiences I've had. I won't ever forget it -- Eleanor Henderson, author * Ten Thousand Saints * Compelling... a plangent and penetrating meditation on grief, the weight of secrets, and the redemptive power of family. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and heartbreaking, this book is a gift to its reader -- Justin St Germain, author * Son of a Gun: A Memoir * Few 24-year-olds have endured the unimaginable losses Will Boast had suffered by that age; fewer still have the artistic poise and sheer visceral honesty to redeem that suffering by transforming it into art... Boast takes his raw emotional content and faces it ruthlessly, translating his extraordinary experiences to the page with a poet's singular vision and restrained lyricism. Boast's story will break your heart; his prose will make it sing -- Jamie Quatro, author * I Want to Show You More * Epilogue is about beginnings as much as endings, discovering as much as losing family. It's honest, heartbreaking, gorgeously written, and hands down the most moving book I've read so far this year -- Anthony Marra, author * A Constellation of Vital Phenomena * This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence and honesty. Though the material is powerful to begin with, what makes it work so well is its authorial voice: a rare combination of rawness and restraint, probing and delicacy, self-laceration and tenderness toward others. In short, it's fully
alive -- Phillip Lopate Excellent... Boast writes with unsparing clarity... A finely wrought, wrenching yet lyrical study of a family that lives on past its seeming end * Publishers Weekly * Raw and lyrical... Boast has a novelist's gift for restraint and character. His scenes are vivid and deeply felt * Shelf Awareness * Spare and lyrical... a bittersweet memoir of home truths and homecoming * Simple Things * This is not a bleak book, even though it's sad, and readers will enjoy Boast's Stateside view of British cultural oddities. You end up liking him a lot, too * Sunday Express * A heartbreakingly raw but gracefully constructed Bildungsroman -- Lucy Scholes * Independent * [B]lew me away and kept me riveted, absolutely locked in its orbit for days.... Will Boast's memoir, Epilogue, [is] about grief and - in the best, subtlest, utterly un-cloying ways - the possibility of unexpected renewal. There's a chapter about Boast's attempt to write a short story about his brother - after his death, giving him life somewhere else - that will stay with me for a long time, a man crafting an alternative narrative to hold what he's haunted by -- Leslie Jamison * The Millions * The way this story is told is important. Will is rocked by tragedies, one after another -- William Leith * Evening Standard * Even deep into his book's final revisions, further revelations come to light, and as [Boast] crosses out things he previously held as certainties, it's reassuring to see how hard it is to place that final full stop on a human life -- Victoria Segal * Guardian *