The husband of the murdered MP Jo Cox is working on a memoir celebrating her life, to be published on the eve of the first anniversary of her death.
Brendan Cox said sleepless nights since his wife’s death had given him time to work on the book, which will include extracts from her diaries and recollections from her family, friends and colleagues.
“Since June my life had been more hectic than ever before. A combination of suddenly being a single parent, responding to the public interest and trying to keep working on the causes I have always cared about,” he said.
“I wanted to write about Jo, but felt doing so was probably impossible because of all the pressures on my time. What I hadn’t factored in was lack of sleep. Sleeping used to be one of the things I was best at, but since June that is no longer true. I often wake at 4am or even 3am nowadays and am unable to get back to sleep. So this book is very much the product of sleep deprivation.”
He is donating all his royalties to the Jo Cox Foundation, which was established to continue her work and highlight the issues she cared about, including the plight of civilians in Syria, and loneliness and social isolation in the UK.
Jo Cox: More in Common will cover her childhood in Yorkshire and her work for charities including Oxfam before her election in May 2015, as well as a family life, including bringing up two small children on a houseboat moored near the Tower of London.
The book will be announced at a publishing event on Monday at which Brendan Cox will speak. Lisa Highton, a publisher at Two Roads, part of the John Murray imprint, said they were proud to be publishing what she described as a moving, inspiring and very personal memoir.
Brendan Cox said writing the book had been extraordinarily hard. “But it’s also been part of my grieving process. Coming to terms with what happened but also remembering the adventures and love of life that our relationship was built upon. Jo packed a lifetime of excitement into her 41 years and the book touches on some of the highlight.
“When I spoke in court during the trial [of Cox’s killer, Thomas Mair], I told the jury that having heard so much about the manner of Jo’s death I wanted to tell them about her life. The objective of this book is the same. To tell people who didn’t know Jo who she really was. In an era of growing hatred and division, I wanted to tell the story of someone who brought love and empathy to everyone she met.”
Jo Cox, who was the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was shot and stabbed to death in the street in the market town of Birstall on 16 June last year, during the EU referendum campaign. Mair, an unemployed gardener with white supremacist sympathies, was convicted of murder in November and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The anniversary of Cox’s death will also be marked by the Great Get Together, an event featuring street parties, bake-offs and picnics.
