Thirty Days

Thirty Days

Mark Raphael Baker

Mark Raphael Baker

One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn's dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her. THIRTY DAYS is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark's wife of 32 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer. It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn's letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate. In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on...
Read online
  • 47
The Fiftieth Gate

The Fiftieth Gate

Mark Raphael Baker

Mark Raphael Baker

What right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there? In writing The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Baker describes a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; it is the story of a son who enters his parents' memories and, inside the darkness, finds light. In his evocative prose, Baker takes us to this place of horror, and then brings us back to reflect on these events and remember: 'Never again'.Across the silence of fifty years, Baker and his family travel from Poland and Germany to Jerusalem and Melbourne, as the author struggles to uncover the mystery of his parents' survival: his father Yossl was imprisoned in concentration camps and his mother Genia was forced into hiding after the Jews of her village were murdered. Twenty years on The Fiftieth Gate remains an extraordinary book. It has become a classic and has now sold over 70,000 copies. In his new introduction, he recalls his...
Read online
  • 18
183