Death of an Ordinary Man

by Sarah Perry

Brought to you by Penguin.

Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love.

Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.

Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.

'Please read this book. It may very well change how you live' Rachel Clarke

'I was spellbound' Kathryn Mannix

'By the end I was left shaken, deeply moved' Christos Tsiolkas

'This book will be a lifeline for so many people' Seán Hewitt

'To read this book is a privilege, a gift on the craft of dying' Amy Key

Sarah Perry 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography

Audible Audio

Published October 2, 2025

About the author

Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979, and was raised as a Strict Baptist. Having studied English at Anglia Ruskin University she worked as a civil servant before studying for an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing and the Gothic at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2004 she won the Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Award for travel writing.

In January 2013 she was Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone's Library. Here she completed the final draft of her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood , which was published by Serpent's Tail in June 2014 to international critical acclaim. It won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award 2014, and was longlisted for the 2014 Guardian First Book Award and nominated for the 2014 Folio Prize. In January and February 2016 Sarah was the UNESCO City of Literature Writer-in-Residence in Prague.

Her second novel, The Essex Serpent , was published by Serpent's Tail in May 2016. It was a number one bestseller in hardback, and was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2016. It was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2017, and was longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 2017, the Wellcome Book Prize, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and the New Angle Prize for Literature. It was broadcast on Radio 4 as a Book at Bedtime in April 2017, is being translated into eleven languages, and has been chosen for the Richard and Judy Summer Book Club 2017.

Sarah has spoken at a number of institutions including Gladstone's Library, the Centre of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, and the Anglo-American University in Prague, on subjects including theology, the history and status of friendship in literature, the Gothic, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Her essays have been published in the Guardian and the Spectator, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She reviews fiction for the Guardian and the Financial Times.

She currently lives in Norwich, where she is completing her third novel.

Reviews

[Claire Fuller]

It was a joy (in the saddest way) to read this straightforward story about the death of Sarah's father in law, David. I have been tired for a long time of memoirs about death, bereavement, grief or illness that feel the need to bring in some kind of healing journey or action. I think I was was tired of them before H is for Hawk and that was quite a while ago. This story, told simply and very beautifully (I underlined so many sentences) documents David's cancer diagnosis and only nine days later his death. Sarah write about the facts and about her feelings, including the frustrations, the irritations and the love. There is so much love in this book, and it moved me to tears. I suppose I am in place (dealing with, thinking about the recent death of my own father albeit in utterly different circumstances) where I am open to the message that its helpful to talk (write) about death in the most uncomplicated ways, but still, I recommend it to all.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) Perry recognises what a sacred privilege it was to witness her father-in-law’s death, which occurred just nine days after his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer. She concludes, like Simone de Beauvoir does of her mother in A Very Easy Death, that David’s end was as good as one might hope for. Viz., he was in his late seventies, remained at home, was looked after by his son and daughter-in-law, more or less maintained his mental capacity until the end, and showed minimal signs of pain or distress. Still, every death is fraught, to some degree, with bureaucracy, medical error and pangs of regret. There is a searing encounter here with an unfeeling GP; on the other hand, there is such kindness from nurses, relatives and a pastor.

The beauty of Perry’s memoir is its patient, clear-eyed unfolding of every stage of dying, a natural and inexorable process that in other centuries would have been familiar to anyone – having observed it with siblings, children, parents, neighbours, distant relatives and so on. She felt she was joining a specifically womanly lineage of ministering, a destiny so quotidian that she didn’t feel uncomfortable with any of the intimate care involved. I thought of my sister and her mother- and sister-in-law sitting vigil at my brother-in-law’s deathbed in 2015.

Perry traces the physical changes in David as he moved with alarming alacrity from normal, if slowed, daily life to complete dependency to death’s door. At the same time, she is aware that this is only her own perspective on events, so she records her responses and emotional state and, to a lesser extent, her husband’s. Her quiver of allusions is perfectly chosen and she lands on just the right tone: direct but tender. Because of her and David’s shared upbringing, the points of reference are often religious, but not obtrusive. My only wish is to have gotten more of a sense of David alive. There’s a brief section on his life at the start, mirrored by a short “Afterlife” chapter at the end telling what succeeded his death. But the focus is very much on the short period of his illness and the days of his dying. During this time, he appears confused and powerless. He barely says anything beyond “I’m in a bit of a muddle,” to refer to anything from incontinence to an inability to eat. At first I thought this was infantilizing him. But I came to see it as a way of reflecting how death strips everything away.

As I read, I often had tears in my eyes, thinking of the deaths I have experienced at second hand and the many more that will come my way until my own. In this gift of a book, Perry captures the emotional poles of bearing witness, and the dignity and uniqueness of every life:

There was relief, and there was loss – it was the saddest thing we’d ever seen, and the best thing we had ever done – all these things existing together undiminished, and never cancelling each other out.

now I understand there are no ordinary lives – that every death is the end of a single event in time’s history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘……there are no ordinary lives- every death is the end of a single event in time’s history: an event so improbable it represents a miracle, and irreplaceable in every particular.’

Let’s be honest, this book is not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s such a moving and compelling read that at times I just couldn’t bear to put it down. Having just been recently bereaved myself, the rawness of reading this so soon after made it so much more relatable to me, but I’m glad I read it when I did and am grateful to NetGalley for the opportunity to read it.

I love Sarah Perry’s writing, and her faith journey fascinates me, even if it’s something she refers to as just ‘chilling embers.’ It is the faith of David however, her father-in-law and the ‘ordinary man’ of the book, which I thinks stirs Sarah the most, and she honours that in the way she, and the family support him when he is diagnosed with Oesophageal cancer. What follows is a tender, compassionate and naturally human reflection on death, grief and the void it leaves.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't remember the last time I saw David, but I do remember his shock of white hair and his particular Heh! Heh! laugh. Sarah does such a beautiful job of showing what kind of a man he was just by his comportment at the end of his life and her reflections on their relationship; it made me regret missing the chance to know him better.

Obviously I don't need to tell you how poignant & incredible & well-crafted is the prose. I think the more impressive accomplishment here is Sarah's ability to draw out the human response to death and dying and the lives of those involved, and to place the reader directly alongside them all at Yarmouth & the hospital & David's bedside. what a perfect title! For Sarah (as you would expect) does not shy away from the details and mechanics of dying or an atmosphere pregnant with grief or her own tendencies to melodramatise the mundane, and in so doing outfits the reader with a sense of what to expect when their time comes. (Perhaps this is just because I have never yet known real loss.)

It would feel absurd to say I enjoyed reading this, so I shan't. Everyone should read it though because David deserves it & Sarah & Rob deserve to have someone know what happened & you deserve to consume the prose, which is really very beautiful.

[Vanessa McMurtrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tender, honest, helpful, triggering, but beautifully written. 4.5 * if I could

[Francis Pellow]

very powerful book which felt over abridged as Radio 4 book of the week.

[jolovesbooks]

Audio book on BBC Sounds.


I haven't read anything by Sarah Perry before. She has a beautiful way with words and it's made me want to read her fiction.

In this thoughtful and articulate account of the death of her father-in-law, David, she examines the experience from different angles.

Some of the moments that stood out to me most were the family love, the admin of dying, the kinship (in Sarah's words) of the carers and the detachment of the doctor who completed the Respect form with David and Sarah:
"While the doctor was bland and untroubled as table staff taking an order."
And yet Sarah has so much empathy:
"It was her job to see her patients' wishes identified, notified and carried out. How could she live if she absorbed the sorrow and dismay of every family? And it occurs to me now that perhaps she was really calloused as I've so often said, since a callous will form in soft places that have too often been rubbed sore."

You really come away with a feel of what David was like, a lovely man and, like us all, uniquely extraordinary in his ordinariness:
"All of this* remarkable only because it can never be repeated or retrieved."

*'This' being the things we like and do and think and feel that make us who we are.

[Donna Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply moving read about what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives. It’s a profound read that resonated with me and I know I will reread .

[Liz Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was excellent. It perfectly describes the complexity of feelings when a parent or in-law gets a terminal diagnosis, the sense of powerlessness one often has in dealing with healthcare, and the difficulties of decision making at the end of life. It's very simply written, but every word is well chosen.
When my father died at home of pancreatic cancer, I remember one of the hospice nurses telling me how rare it is now for families to manage this, and that it would be a source of comfort to us all. Nearly 20 years on, it still is. I hope that Sarah and her husband will feel the same.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story about an ordinary life, an ordinary family, and a cancer diagnosis at the age of 72, leading on to an ordinary death, 9 days later.
For those who have experienced an ordinary death, this book will feel familiar - you'll understand the author's actions, thinking, and ways of dealing with the fast arrival of the death of her father-in-law.
It's a great reminder that the little, often unimportant, things that we do in our ordinary lives that make us loved by others, and that we are all persons of interest, no matter how ordinary our lives may appear to be.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short but worthy read.
My only ‘complaint’ is I felt the author was very naive about death. I understand that nowadays people don’t live with it in their midst anymore, and that she had had no children but I felt she and her husband (who had been a carer before, for his mother) seemed clueless about some things such as when David wet himself a few times and they then waited to be told to get adult nappies.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful, heartbreaking read about the death of Perry's father-in-law, in the matter of days since his diagnosis, which conveys love, gratitude, sadness, ache And a beautiful portrayal of af an ordinary man named David Perry.

"It's all right, my darling," I said. "It's all right, Dad. We're going to be OK - if you have to go now, we're going to be all right."

[Derek Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is absolutely nothing ordinary about this remarkable book. Honest, deeply moving and profound. There are no cheap homilies here, no performative sentiment just the raw reality of a death witnessed.

[Becca Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh gosh….a lesson in living through a death of a deeply loved man with dignity and grace.

[Thomas Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, beautiful book that in the recollection of one man's death and life, captures the experience and humanity of many.