“This was the first photograph I ever saw of Susie. It hung in the bedroom of her little flat in Maida Vale in London, and I fell in love with it. Of course, I also fell in love with Susie herself, and thirty years later we are still as devoted to each other as two people can be.” That’s Nick Cave at the jump, setting the terms of this book: The black-and-white images by Issermann, a French fashion photographer and longtime friend of the Caves, are meant to make readers fall a little in love with Susie, too. Here she is, a silhouette on the beach, posing for Issermann in Normandy in 1990; here’s Susie in Rome in 1996, under a long black veil. Susie, too, chimes in, writing that she and Nick married in 1999 and had twin sons the following year. The ensuing photos often include the twins—Nick’s hands are shown drawing with pen on a child’s hand; there’s a blurry close-up of mother and son—and the book transforms into a family album. (A photo index clarifies that the family pictures were taken at an Italian estate in 2008.) Readers may note that only one child is spoken of in the present tense, suggesting what isn’t stated outright: One of the Cave twins has since died. That so few of the family pictures feature crisply focused faces plays like an effort to avert the pain of confronting loss head-on. It’s through no shortcoming of Issermann’s starkly beautiful images that readers can’t possibly find Susie as captivating as her husband does; the book is more successful—immensely so—as a grief album made heartbreakingly public.