[1] Strauss, a novelist, recounts how his life was profoundly altered when a car he was driving struck and killed a high school classmate.

[1] Although it was determined Strauss could in no way have avoided the accident, the book details his attempts, over half his life, to come to terms with his feelings of responsibility.

Writing in The Guardian,[3] writer and critic Robert McCrum called the book "a masterpiece....'Half my life ago, I killed a girl'.

What follows—Strauss's precise, honest and rigorous account of a fateful road accident and its harrowing aftermath—fulfills every hope aroused in the casual reader."

"[4] Writer Dani Shapiro, in The New York Times Book Review,[5] found the memoir "elegant, painful, stunningly honest."