Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their daughter fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then she was placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary.

This powerful book is Didion’s ‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness’. The result is a personal yet universal portrait of marriage and life, in good times and bad, from one of the defining voices of American literature.

‘Beautiful and devastating … Didion has always been a precise, humane and meticulously truthful writer, but on the subject of death she becomes essential’ Zadie Smith