The Lost Art Of Gratitude - Rilegato

"Reading it is a mysteriously enlarging experience. It could pair neatly with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking: it's hard to imagine two more rigorous, unsentimental guides to enduring the very bottom of the scale of human emotion." (Time Lev Grossman)

"Stunning...it is a triumph of her will and her writing that she has turned her tragedy into a literary gift." (PW (Starred Review))

"What an extraordinary book - joy and sorrow all mixed together on every page. Elizabeth McCracken is amazing." (Mameve Medwed, author of Of Men and Their Mothers)

"'A child dies in this book: a baby,'" Elizabeth McCracken tell us early on, so that we we might not hope too much, as she has, for the beautiful child who would grace her life. Alert to every nuance of feeling, McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy that we hope anyway. 'It's a happy life,' she says, 'and someone is missing.' That these statements can both be true is the mark of great emotional maturity, and of a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart." (Mark Doty, author of Dog Years)

"In AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION, Elizabeth McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all." (Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon)

"[A] fascinating, word-perfect and bittersweet memoir." (Miami Herald Elinor Lipman)

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over eighty books on a wide array of subjects, including the award-winning The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. He is also the author of the Isabel Dalhousie novels and the world's longest-running serial novel, 44 Scotland Street. His books have been translated into forty-six languages. Alexander McCall Smith is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and holds honorary doctorates from thirteen universities.