Memoirs by grieving parents obviously have some similarities; what makes the best of them unique is each writer’s voice. I was reminded, up to a point, of Jayson Greene’s magnificent memoir about his young daughter’s death, Once More We Saw Stars. But A Heart That Works is a book about grief as only Delaney could write it. Indeed, it is the work of a more mature writer than the one who published his first memoir in 2013.

From the start, everything is narrated from a present tense in which Henry is already gone; just as in life, where grief explodes and warps time, everything feels incredibly close one second and unbearably far away the next.

To those who have felt the icy grip of grief around their own throats, it is a relief to read an account of grief that is not a series of hard-won life lessons wrapped in a gratitude journal.

... it gives me great pleasure, and no pleasure at all, to write that Rob Delaney’s new book is both overwhelmingly moving and, in any other way you might assess a book, excellent.

... less funny than it is outright phenomenal. Serving as a written act of grief, Delaney delves into the tragic death of his 2½-year-old son in 2018 with a book that is likely to find itself on many best-of-the-year lists next month.

Heartbreaking, consoling, funny and angry, it also works as lament, all of its threads pulled tight by the one strong metaphor of drowning that forms its backbone.

What a relief it is that the memoir of Rob Delaney is excellent: tender, perceptive and strangely, darkly funny amid unconscionable tragedy...I’m not sure how I’d have reviewed the writing down of such intimate grief had it not been good, but fortunately it is. Very.

Unspeakably admirable.

A devastatingly candid account of a parent’s grief that will have readers laughing and crying in equal measure.