Leave No Trace

In 1995, a phone call reached a young couple in Paris. Days later, jet-lagged and jarred, Greg Holdsworth stood beside his father-in-law's open coffin in New Zealand and tapped a handle with his fingernail.

It was plastic, coated to look like metal. The timber wasn't what it looked like either. Mike had spent his weekends restoring wooden yachts - and he'd been sent off in a box about as authentic as a Chinatown Rolex. Nobody said a word.

Leave No Trace is the story of what happened next: a design project that became an eco coffin, a garage that became a factory, and a small New Zealand company that quietly changed what a funeral could look like.

Return To Sender began with plywood, stubbornness and a conviction that the last object we ever use ought to mean something. It ended with a design exhibited at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt in New York, a shelf of awards, an industry rethinking its habits - and an abrupt, unplanned exit that turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.

Part memoir, part design story, part argument for doing death better.

Funny, unsentimental and unexpectedly moving, this is a book about grief, craft, green burial and the strange business of building something new inside one of the world's most conservative industries. You'll never look at a coffin the same way again.