“The expression ‘still waters run deep’ has never been more apt. Jeff Sutherland’s Still Life is the training manual all of us need for how to face terrible loss and redefine the good life. If only Job could have read it.” –MO ROCCA, CBS Sunday Morning

“Sutherland’s prose is measured and thoughtful, and his accounts of fleeting moments are made all the more heartbreaking by his understated appreciation of them: ‘I remember … my last week in the hospital, strolling through the medical unit with a walker to keep my balance—recognizing the irony that my life expectancy was now shorter than that of most of the patients in my charge.’ The author is such a sympathetic narrator, and his story is so mortifyingly tragic, that readers will undoubtedly be persuaded by the wisdom he draws from his experiences…. [T]here is a serenity to his grief—a literal one—that is unexpectedly reassuring.

He comes off not as a prisoner of his own body, but rather as a monk in a cell who has been granted a rare opportunity to observe a world that few readers have the patience to see. With immense humility, he questions many of the things that people assume are necessary aspects of the human experience, digging toward a deeper, kinder understanding of life. An affecting account remarkable both in its content and execution.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS

“This is a book about loss and grief and suffering so on one level it is difficult, but because Still Life is also about the will to live, and how to do that in the face of cruel disease and the accidental death of a beloved child, it is also exhilarating. This weird and sometimes uncomfortably honest book is Jeff Sutherland, who can’t actually move a muscle anymore, giving death the finger.” –CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD, columnist, National Post