Ash before Oak

‘[W]hat Cooper offers, very boldly and successfully, is a broad narrative arc of collapse and tentative recovery, in which a struggle for meaning and purpose in life assumes a desperate intensity…. Because of the narrator’s inability to describe his anguish, what’s mostly written here is not his pain, but his clinging to life: the beauty caught and traced, with great skill, in trying to overcome suffering. In its journal form, Ash before Oak salvages detritus, the unremarkable mess, banality and repetition of the everyday, just as the narrator works on restoring his dilapidated buildings in Somerset. And in a larger way, too, with admirable wisdom and precision, it salvages, from agonizing, ruinous thoughts and experiences, something transcendent, of lasting value.’

Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Times Literary Supplement

‘Low-key and understated, this beautiful book … is a civilised and melancholy document that slowly progresses towards a sense of enduring, going onwards, and even new life. It feels like a healing experience.’

Phil Baker, The Sunday Times