Ash before Oak

'... what 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

'A disarming and gorgeously rendered portrait of interiority ... The novel's genius lies in what goes unsaid, and in the gaps between entries - what the narrator keeps from readers is the most haunting plot of all. This meandering novel is one of quiet beauty, and brief flashes of joy among seasons of despair. A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review

'Mr. Cooper's depiction of depression is powerful-and very challenging-in its artlessness. We do not follow a clean arc from near-death to recovery. Instead we find ourselves in the midst of a marathon, something grueling and repetitive and, though filled with hopeful pleasures, always dogged by despair.' - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal