"This harrowing account of unthinkable maternal loss is affectingly raw, and ultimately inspiring."
Aching with a mother’s ceaseless love for her children, Julia Engelhorn’s Precious Scars will break your heart and heal it, as the author shares the unthinkable loss of her three-year-old twins, and how she moved through the visceral pain of grief to the hope of healing.
In the introduction, the author refers to Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with golden glue, explaining that “the philosophy behind it is to value the beauty of the broken object with its imperfections, to celebrate, not hide them.” It’s an ethos she’s adopted to find a way to survive and find strength in the wake of her twin three-year-olds being murdered by her ex-husband — “the scars I carry with me, inside me, are a reminder of what I have survived. From the broken pieces of my old self, something new was created, just as beautiful, but different.”
After sharing how she and her ex-husband Mario met in Spain, fell in love, celebrated their wedding at her family’s restaurant in St Moritz, their son César was born in July 2009. From then, Julia notes, their relationship began to change, “though I didn’t realise it at the time.” Living largely apart, with Mario in Barcelona and Julia in Cape Town, she falls pregnant with their twins, but soon realises she wants a divorce.
Following their protracted, fractious split, during one Easter holiday, Mario invited Julia to collect the children early. “Pick up a knife and kill me with it because I am going to kill you,” he orders, before telling her “the kids are dead.” While César is safe, Julia sees he’s killed their twins, Octavia and Maximo.
Truly affecting, Precious Scars takes us through Julia’s unimaginable pain and loss with brutal honesty and much grace as she shares her journey to healing — a journey that many readers might take hope and sustenance from.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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