The Last Good Funeral of the Year

War correspondent, father, husband, son, friend and grieving brother - Ed O’Loughlin has given us a powerful and unusual memoir. At times heartbreaking and often laugh-aloud funny, The Last Good Funeral is set to be among the very best of books for 2022. – Christine Dwyer Hickey
Ed O’Loughlin is a natural storyteller, a good one, and he invites the reader right alongside in his honest search for meaning through reminiscence, memory and adventure. With precision and expertise, he probes past and present chapters of his life, all the while imparting his own brand of wisdom and humour. A great pleasure to read! – Frances Itani, winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and author of Deafening
The past is a revenant that haunts the present in this exquisite and startling memoir by Ed O’Loughlin. The Last Good Funeral of the Year is a witty, engaging, heartbreaking, and beautifully wrought tour through the workings of memory, all unearthed during the world’s great period of lockdown stillness. The stories and their people will remain with you long after finishing this book. – Emily Urquhart, Canadian author and memoirist
The Last Good Funeral of the Year is intelligent, funny, profound, painfully honest, beautifully written, and powerfully moving. Ed O’Loughlin is a writer who does brilliantly everything he turns his hand to; it’s no surprise to find that his memoir is so unforgettably good. – Kevin Power, author of White City
This is a searing book, reminiscent of Joan Didion’s masterpiece, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” It wheels between the waypoints in O’Loughlin’s life with remarkable dexterity, honesty and grace… What I found here was an exquisite portrait of grief * The Miramichi Reader *
[A] brief and astonishingly frank memoir … Deftly and with increasing assurance, O’Loughlin weaves the tapestry of a life, pulling at the threads and dropped stitches of experience that have brought him to this difficult time and place …The account of his brother Simon’s struggles with depression is achingly sad and beautifully rendered … O’Loughlin can be acerbic, self-deprecating and droll, often in the same paragraph. * Sunday Times Ireland *
The Last Good Funeral of the Year by Ed O’Loughlin. It’s one of the most unflinching memoirs you’ll ever read. lt’s an at-tirnes­ sad, at-times-funny excavation of SO-something years of living conducted during the Covid lockdowns. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks after finishing it. * Sunday Independent *

Ed O’Loughlin is an Irish-Canadian author and journalist. He is the author of three previous novels, including the Booker Prize-longlisted Not Untrue and Not Unkind, the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Minds of Winter, and the critically acclaimed Toploader. As a journalist, he reported from Africa for several newspapers, including the Irish Times and the Independent of London. He was later the Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne. Born in Toronto and raised in Ireland, he now lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.

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