The Flower Bearers

De: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world Julia Samuel

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths' closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

©2026 Rachel Eliza Griffiths (P)2026 Penguin Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world (Julia Samuel)

Unsparing and full-throated. In The Flower Bearers, grief is to love as pain is to pleasure. Through the lens of a poet and documentarian, Griffiths deftly explores what it is to bear witness and to remain present. The Flower Bearers offers a transformative testament to the fragility of life and the compulsion to look when others look away. Griffiths' call to document and make sense of the horror, the fear, and the gut-wrenching pain of loss is, at its core, an exploration of capacity, resilience, and the deeply human need to remain open to love in all its forms. (A. M. Holmes)

What a gift The Flower Bearers is. Tenderly, carefully, Rachel Eliza Griffiths excavates deep into matters of her heart, and her sentences make space for readers to do the same. Griffiths writes with beauty and consideration, not just about what happens when grief wrecks your foundations, but the light that emerges through those cracks. This is a precise and intentional masterwork, that reminded me of the power of love that endures. (Caleb Azumah Nelson)