Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
'For fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Halle Butler' LEIGH STEIN, author of Self Care
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
'Funny about death, real about anxiety, witty about the things that worry us the most' Emma Gannon, author of Olive
'So fundamentally kind that you can feel the warmth coming off each page' Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days
Meet Gilda. She cannot stop thinking about death. Desperate for relief from her anxious mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local church and finds herself abruptly hired to replace the deceased receptionist Grace. It's not the most obvious job - she's queer and an atheist for starters - and so in between trying to learn mass, hiding her new maybe-girlfriend and conducting an amateur investigation into Grace's death, Gilda must avoid revealing the truth of her mortifying existence.
A blend of warmth, deadpan humour, and pitch-perfect observations about the human condition, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a crackling exploration of what it takes to stay afloat in a world where your expiration - and the expiration of those you love - is the only certainty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Runaway humor sustains an otherwise grim story in Austin's exuberant debut. After a car accident in which 27-year-old Gilda breaks her arm, she visits an emergency room where she's a frequent patient, then responds to an ad offering free mental health support at a church. There, a priest mistakes her for a job applicant, and she doesn't correct him. After the interview, Gilda accidentally becomes a receptionist, taking over for the late Grace Moppet, who may have been the victim of a homicidal nurse. As the receptionist, Gilda rapidly falls prey to impostor syndrome, a problem she faced during her last job as a bookseller ("I didn't really get 1984 and... I hate poetry"). Meanwhile, Gilda, an atheist and a lesbian, makes awkward attempts to masquerade as a good Catholic, mistaking communion wafers for crackers, trying to understand hymns, catechism, baptism, and the blessed sacrament of confession. The plot thickens as Gilda responds to emails from one of her predecessor's friends as Grace. What starts out as genuinely bleak affair, with a depressed Gilda considering suicide, becomes a brisk story underpinned by a vibrant cast. Fans of Helene Tursten's An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good will find much to enjoy.
