-- is Everyone is Still Alive, which is about the deeper realities of marriage and parenting. She has a book about how to write a memoir coming in January 2022 called Write It All Down.
Rentzenbrink regularly chairs literary events, interviews authors, reviews books, runs creative writing courses and speaks and writes on life, death, love, and literature. Despite being shortlisted for various prizes, the only thing she has ever won is the Snaith and District Ladies’ Darts Championship when she was 17. She is now sadly out of practice.
At the Guardian Rentzenbrink tagged ten cherished books featuring some of literature’s finest bibliophiles. One entry on the list:
The English Patient by Michael OndaatjeRead about the other entries on the list at the Guardian.
In a villa north of Florence in 1945, Hana chooses books from the huge library to read to her badly burned patient, who was rescued by the Bedouin when his plane crashed in the desert. He is damaged beyondrecognition and has no memory. The only possession that survived the fire is his copy of The Histories by Herodotus, into which he has glued pages from other books and written observations in his small, gnarled handwriting. They live quietly and slowly, and then everything changes with the arrival of a friend of Hana’s father who has a theory about the identity of her patient.
The English Patient also made Eli Goldstone's ten top list of secrets in fiction, Sarah Moss's top ten list of hospital novels, Robert Allison's top ten list of novels of desert war, Joel Cunningham's list of sixteen book-to-movie adaptations that won Academy Awards, Pico Iyer's top five list of books on crossing cultures, John Mullan's list of ten of the best deserts in literature and Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpiece stories that worked as films.
--Marshal Zeringue