Last Words
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Hugh Graham captures the passage of years, the progression of accumulation and recurrence, the present as dammed up history. Without warning, a world on the road to epiphany. And that world, threatened with disaster. Figures emerge, often from twilight. Children who do not fear death, travelers doomed to inertia, concupiscent women, bloody-minded intellectuals, haunted drunks, decaying diplomats, and Death as the man in the attic room. In the end, the gaze of a child become a man. Eleven stories of clarity and dark empathy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this impressive collection of short stories from Graham (The Vestibule of Hell), the characters children, drunks, intellectuals all tend to be bookish and introspective. Their worlds are all threatened by some looming disaster, named or unnamed. The book begins with a suspenseful and moving story that introduces John Last, a Canadian holed up in a Paris hotel. Breaking into his misanthropic existence, a brash American CIA operative named Howard recruits him to help thwart a terrorist attack, with surprising results. Several stories are told from the point of view of Henry, a child growing up in post-war Toronto surrounded by melancholy, vaguely incomprehensible adults; Death is the man who rents the attic room. In another tale, Elmira Rawlinson strikes up a romance with a boy named Tom in order to escape her abusive family, but the violence in her past has seeped into her and become inescapable. All of these stories have a dark tone, but they also contain an underlying current of gentle humor and empathy for their damaged characters. Graham's writing is rich and to be savored slowly. Readers are in for a great pleasure.
