Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

The Iceberg by Marion Coutts

The Iceberg

A Memoir

by Marion Coutts

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2016, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize, and finalist for every major nonfiction award in the UK, including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Award, The Iceberg is artist and writer Marion Coutts' astonishing memoir; an - adventure of being and dying - and a compelling, poetic meditation on family, love, and language.

In 2008, Tom Lubbock, the chief art critic for The Independent was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The Iceberg is his wife, Marion Coutts', fierce, exquisite account of the two years leading up to his death. In spare, breathtaking prose, Coutts conveys the intolerable and, alongside their two year old son Ev - whose language is developing as Tom's is disappearing - Marion and Tom lovingly weather the storm together. In short bursts of exquisitely textured prose, The Iceberg becomes a singular work of art and an uplifting and universal story of endurance in the face of loss.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Riveting...poignant memoir...A poetic and moving chronicle of loss." - Kirkus

"Profoundly moving...the intertwining journeys of father and son make this intricate tale of life and death all the more powerful...exquisite." - Publishers Weekly

"An extraordinary memoir... one of the most astonishing books. I was transfixed by it. [Coutts'] work is marvelously wrought and quite experimental, yet says very blunt things." - Guernica

"A fierce love letter-cum-elegy... This is far more than just another book about grief." - The Observer (UK)

"A memoir quite unlike any other. It has the strength of an arrow: taut, spiked, quavering, working to its fatal conclusion...an extraordinary story told in an extraordinary way." - Sunday Times (UK)

"The most heartbreaking memoir of the year." - Independent on Sunday (UK)

"A book that clearly had to be written...to be read by anyone who ever pauses to consider our mortality." - The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"The Iceberg is mesmerizing, harrowing, and radiant... it is impossible to put it down." - Daily Mail (UK)

"Unflinching yet uplifting...[Coutts is] a chronicler of what it means to be human." - Financial Times (UK)

"The writing is lyrical, textured, perfectly paced; the sentences short so that we feel Coutts's moments of panic, her quickened heartbeat... [A] startlingly beautiful and inspiring pioneer text." - The Independent (UK)

"[Coutts] chooses her words with such beautiful scrupulousness, never twisting or turning the knife of her story to exact our pity or admiration; her thought is like sensation, her descriptions of feeling are often like notes for a visual work... Her book is a homage to an exceptional man; it's also the work of an exceptional woman artist." - The Guardian (UK)

"Extraordinary... Not quite like any other bereavement memoir." - The Evening Standard (UK)

"Searing, shocking, unflinching, profoundly moving." - The Spectator (UK)

"Marion Coutts' account of living with her husband's illness and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed. Reading it, you have the sense of something truly unique being brought into the world – it stays with you for a long time after." - Bill Bryson (Wellcome Prize citation)

This information about The Iceberg was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Marion Coutts

Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. She works in sculpture, film and video and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including the Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and the Wellcome Collection, London. She has held fellowships at Kettle¹s Yard, Cambridge and Tate Liverpool. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. She lives in London with her son. This is her first book.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more biography/memoir...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.