By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. In his absorbing book about the lost and the gone, Peter Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to Milltown to Kensal Green, to melancholy islands and surprisingly lively ossuaries . One such is a patch of wasteland on the edge of a Belfast golf course where Roman Catholic doctrine dictated that un-baptised babies be buried in unconsecrated ground in unmarked graves.

I love Peter Ross's writing - he always treats his subjects with kindness and curiosity, and in A Tomb With a View, he demonstrates that he extends that curtesy to the dead as well as the living. An entire chapter is devoted to people who were outcasts in life and death: prostitutes, unbaptized children, people who committed suicide.To the taphophile - a lover of graves- Sheridan’s lair is the equivalent of a rare bird to the twitcher. The final chapter of A Tomb with a View discusses Arnos Vale, a cemetery in Bristol, England and one that I am quite familiar with, as I lived next door in Bath for four years. My favorite cemeteries in the world are Mound Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio as there is a Native American mound there alongside being where my grandfather is buried alongside Père Lachaise in Paris, which is always my first stop when I am in Paris.

Ross reads his own words well in this tale of the history of mortality in the UK and Ireland, focusing on the stories of the deceased or their resting places.In some ways, these people are the Thanatotic equivalents of the glorious eccentrics Ross has interviewed as a journalist. I became aware of this book when the author, Peter Ross, kindly agreed to take part in our local book festival which of course last year had to be entirely online. He includes examples of both the barbaric past (the witch’s grave in Torry Bay) and the barbaric present (the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, the shooting of Lyra McKee in Belfast). It struck me then that every gravestone is a story, and I set out to learn and tell as many as I could.

Just a few days ago my partner and fellow Shiny reviewer Basil Ransome Davies found a new walk to do in these times of Covid-inspired local diversions.

One hundred years after the end of the First World War, men who fought in it are still being buried in Belgium and France, as their bodies are retrieved and identified. In the book we learn about forgotten figures like Lilias Adie, an elderly Scot who was imprisoned as a witch in Fife in 1704. There was also a deal of civic and national pride involved – so Kensal Green was London’s answer to Pere Lachaise in Paris.