Bring Us Home From Sorrow

Joanne doesn’t skirt or blink the responsibilities of heartache, but carries her grief as a gift, writing so that the reader will be less lost. This journey through grief is a mothering of culture to help navigate present-day chaos and sorrow. So many love-zingers. This book serves life, now.

-Nathalie Roy, shepherdess, co-founder of Orphan Wisdom School & founder of The Scriptorium, housing Stephen Jenkinson’s collected works

Invigorating and thunderous, painful, soothing and nourishing, these pages are as immersive, exacting and jubilant as the author’s own experience navigating the riptides and muscularity of the ocean she swims in every day. You will love being in these waters; you will find solace, wisdom, courage and guidance as you accompany Joanne on her journey of loss-and renewal to the miracle that is life.

-Shira Nayman, author of Awake in the Dark, and Shoreline: A memoir of wandering, friendship and finding home

From a palliative care and bereavement perspective, this memoir fills an important gap. Many people struggle to articulate their grief, particularly adult children who are expected to “cope” and move on. This book offers language, recognition, and permission. It affirms that grief is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived, witnessed, and integrated over time’.

-Yvonne Coburn, formerly a National Champion for Palliative Care Australia

Written with unflinching honesty, grace, and love, I felt my own experiences of love and loss mirrored in Joanne’s conflicted pull to be present for those suffering and yet the need to escape the claustrophobic wrench of dying.

-Jane Badler, actor and singer, Diana in NBC’s science fiction series V

Bring Us Home to Sorrow is large of heart and narrative scope, traversing time and place, continents and generations. It moves vertically, into the depths of the narrator’s inner world and back up to the exigencies of caring for a dying mother. This energy brings an extraordinary depth of generosity to the book - the quality of sharing that envelops the reader will provide many with profound consolation.

-Katia Ariel, author of The Swift Dark Tide and The Ferryman

Raw, wise and beautifully written, this is a book of rare emotional depth and grace. Joanne Fedler is a profoundly gifted writer, and Bring Us Home From

Sorrow is luminous and life-affirming.

-Jane Tara, author of Tilda is Visible

Fedler writes this story as an arc through generations, meals, and memories. The arc becomes liquid; it reads like tides read gravity through the moon. You are called to swim through time and love the way mothers, daughters, sisters and entire cultures are brewed into being. Everything is here, and it is the water of life and death.

-Nora Bateson, mother, daughter, award-winning filmmaker,

President of the International Bateson Institute,

founder and creator of Warm Data,

author of Combining and Small Arcs of Larger Circles

This book is a vigil for the secret life of grief. Written from inside the dark night of loss, it refuses to turn away from what is leaving, dying, or already gone. It is a love story, an ocean, a private room where devotion and absence kneel together. An extraordinary unveiling of the distances the heart must traverse, Bring Us Home From Sorrow offers a tender, brutal initiation into what grief knows about us.

-Jessy Chapnik Kahn, poet, singer, author of MADRE

Joanne Fedler is the internationally bestselling author of more than fifteen titles which have been translated into many languages and have sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. She is a Fulbright scholar and has a master’s degree in law from Yale. Prior to immigrating to Australia in 2001, Joanne set up and ran a legal advocacy centre to end violence against women in South Africa. She also sat on a Law Commission to rewrite domestic violence legislation. Joanne lives close to Coogee beach where she indulges her love of open-water ocean swimming. Joanne mentors aspiring writers both one-on-one and in groups, at retreats all over the world as well as online.