Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph, among others. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story was rated one of the best books of the year, 2020 by the Observer and the Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and was a Sunday Times bestseller. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and five children.
A few weeks before Christmas, Clover’s sister Nell Gifford, founder of Gifford’s Circus, died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Nell’s sudden death split Clover’s life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover’s fearless passage through the first year after her sister’s death. It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words.
Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human.
‘The most beautiful, enduring, indelible, transcendent love letter from a sister to a sister that I will ever read’ Juliet Nicholson
‘Clover Stroud is a fearless explorer of the human heart, and a writer of incomparable grace and passion.’ Elizabeth Gilbert