All at Sea

A beautifully written, breathtakingly honest, unsentimental, profound memoir of love and loss from one of the UK's most popular journalists

Tony always used to tell me to think less and feel more, but I never could. Now that that's all I can do, I can see he was right—and if feelings are his gift from the grave, I'm afraid of taming them into words.

In May 2014, on a hot, still morning on a beautiful beach in Jamaica, Decca Aitkenhead's life changed irrevocably. First her four year old son, Jake, splashing by the water's edge, was dragged out to sea by a riptide. Then Tony, her partner and Jake's father, dove in to save him but drowned in the process.
    Tony, a mixed-race former prisoner, drug dealer, and crack addict from the industrial north, and Decca, a prize-winning Guardian journalist from the bucolic West Country ("Black" and "Decca") had always made an improbable couple. For years they tried to find a way to come together from very different starting places. Tony reformed himself, got an education, and then a job. Decca bore him two sons, and they bought a medieval farmhouse in Kent and set about transforming it. A decade later, lying on the sand in their favorite place in the world, young, strong, fit, and with their children playing at their feet, they were congratulating themselves on their achievements when everything was ripped away.
     Bookended by the untimely death of Decca's mother and Tony's drowning, All at Sea looks at class, race, privilege, and prejudice through the prism of Decca's life. It stares into the dark chasm of our worst nightmare—a random accidental tragedy—and somehow finds the light on the other side.