Say Her Name - Couverture souple

"Passionate and moving... beautifully written... the truth that emerges in this book has less to do with the mystery of [Aura's] death... than with the miracle of the astonishing, spirited, deeply original young woman Goldman so adored... So remarkable is this resurrection that at times I felt the book itself had a pulse." --The New York Times Book Review

"To call Francisco Goldman's book about the death of his young Mexican wife an elegy hardly represents it. Lament is closer, but insufficient. It is a chain of eruptions, a meteor shower; not just telling but bombarding us in a loss that glitters. With the power and fine temper of its writing, it is as much poem as prose... Tense set pieces, respectively heartbreaking and chilling... generate the book's propulsive drama. What they propel, though, is its most remarkable achievement: the incandescent portrait of a marriage of opposites." --Boston Globe

"We may feel we know something about love's burn, the scorching heat of loss, but reading this book is to stand in front of a blow-torch, to take a farrier's rasp to raw nerve ends. Say Her Name is wrenching, funny, powerful, and beautiful." --Annie Proulx

"This is a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss. Say Her Name has a forensic honesty, a way of treating each detail, each moment, each emotion, with detailed and exact care. It also has a way of holding the reader, of moving between Brooklyn and Mexico City, capturing the essence of two worlds, capturing the essence of two people who were lucky enough to fall in love."
--Colm Toibin

'It's the must-read novel of the summer... both a beautiful evocation of love and loss, and a searing dispatch written from within a personal Ground Zero.' --Sunday Times

'It leads the reader into Goldman's private underworlds, and somehow, sure-footedly, manages to navigate a way out.' --Observer

'Passionate and moving... beautifully written... the truth that emerges in this book has less to do with the mystery of [Aura's] death... than with the miracle of the astonishing, spirited, deeply original young woman Goldman so adored... So remarkable is this resurrection that at times I felt the book itself had a pulse.' --New York Times Book Review

'We may feel we know something about love's burn, the scorching heat of loss, but reading this book is to stand in front of a blow-torch, to take a farrier's rasp to raw nerve ends. Say Her Name is wrenching, funny, powerful, and beautiful.' --Annie Proulx

'This is a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss. Say Her Name has a forensic honesty, a way of treating each detail, each moment, each emotion, with detailed and exact care. It also has a way of holding the reader, of moving between Brooklyn and Mexico City, capturing the essence of two worlds, capturing the essence of two people who were lucky enough to fall in love.' --Colm Toibin

`What makes Say Her Name so unforgettable, apart from the beauty of the writing, is that the book is written partly as a love story but also partly as a moral trial.' --Evening Standard

Celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda in the summer of 2005. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura's death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die too. But instead he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain.

Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe - and always through the prism of her gifted writings - Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humour leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of utter grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous and playful as it is deep and profound.

Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura - who she was and who she would have been.