Since the death in 1998 of his wife, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, John Bayley has given much thought to adjusting to his new, single status. As the carer of a victim of Alzheimer's, his was in many ways a double-bereavement as Iris, in the sense of the person who John Bayley met and married, very slowly departed this world some years before her physical death. A meditation on bereavement and loss written in John Bayley's inimitably sensitive and amusing style of reminiscence, Widower's House reads like despatches from another, gentler era.