The Flower Bearers

'A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world' Julia Samuel 'The Flower Bearers goes to some dark places, but there is joy, too . . . simultaneously a love story, a portrait of sisterhood and a visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation' Guardian 'Lyrical and life-affirming . . . A deeply felt, expressive book that battles with despair and hope, ever searching for the latter' Scotsman On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, her closest friend, Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Rachel Eliza was learning to exist without her, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Rachel Eliza realized that to survive her heartbreak, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day. And so Rachel Eliza chronicles her seventeen years of friendship with Aisha. From the moment they met in a college library, she knew she had found a soul sister. Their life together was filled with music: they danced to records in their apartments and skipped from one sticky jazz bar to another. Sitting side-by-side at poetry circles, reading Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, marching through Harlem protesting lost Black lives, Rachel Eliza drew inspiration and strength from her friend. Together they learnt to embrace themselves, as writers, artists, and Black women. Rachel Eliza interweaves this love story with another, that of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the depth of their connection. Celebrating the ways that these two extraordinary people have transformed her life, she reflects on the beauty and pain that come with opening oneself fully to love.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an artist, poet, and novelist. Her recent hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths' work has appeared widely, including The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), Tin House, and many others. Her debut novel, Promise, was published in 2023. She lives in New York City.