A Tomb With a View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards: Scottish Non-fiction Book of the Year 2021

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How they fell in love, and how it was a love story right to the end, even though in hindsight she realises he should have been sectioned. Il mio problema è il contenuto che ha deciso di raccontare per ogni cimitero: non ha sempre scelto i personaggi più importanti, o le caratteristiche peculiari di un luogo. Overall I enjoyed this book, given that graveyards are not something I know much about or am particularly passionate about - if such topics are your thing I think this would be an interesting read. Going into this I’d hoped I’d learn more about the symbols on gravestones and what they tell us, but this book was more a journalistic overview in which the author visited lots of graveyards and discussed death with people there. Ross takes us down a balanced path of love and remembrance, seeing life and death from all angles and leading us on a non-biased, compassionate journey.

He moves along a non-linear path, from accounts of loneliness and mental illness to encounters with religious tension – including the burial of murdered Irish journalist Lyra McKee.He was commodified, intellectualised, became a creature of ink and paint and wax, and was almost certainly unaware of all the fuss.

Uncovering those histories has been something that has captivated Peter Ross and in A Tomb With a View, he finds the stories of the people who inhabit graveyards and the people that still care about them.Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome. The final chapter of A Tomb with a View discusses Arnos Vale, a cemetery in Bristol, England and one that I am quite familiar with, as I lived next door in Bath for four years. The grieving, the caretakers, the gravediggers and the guides are all given prominence in this volume, but nowhere more poignantly than in the story of Shane MacThomáis, the Dublin man who tended the tombs in Glasnevin Cemetery so diligently. A Tomb With A View is set in as sinister an old library as one is likely to come across presided over by a portrait of a grim faced, mad eyed old man.