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Sleeping with the Dead
Marko Cunningham
I easily get sucked into a good book. So it’s not rare for books to make me cry or give me goose bumps. However, it is rare for me to get goose bumps every single time I even think about a book. Sleeping with the Dead is one of those books. To start with, Marko Cunningham has made some incredible decisions. British born but raised in NZ, he’s somehow ended up in Bangkok as a volunteer ambulance driver. A surprisingly dangerous and thankless job. Sometimes he’s helping the survivors of an accident, sometimes he’s recovering those who haven’t survived. Often he risks his own life to do so. An amazing thing to do with your spare time.
But what really affected me in reading this book was Marko’s account of his volunteer work in Phuket immediately after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. He had no idea what he was heading into when he jumped on the military plane taking volunteers down there. He says himself that what he dealt with changed him forever. How do you deal with a human tragedy on that scale? How do you cope with the grief of friends and relatives? How can you return to a normal life in a big city and not struggle to return to the day to day?
In this book Marko addresses all of that and more. It’s a frank, no-frills account of the life and experiences of an incredible Kiwi.
To read an extract click here.
RRP $37.99 | large paperback
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