Love Letters of the Angels of Death
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A breathtaking literary debut, Love Letters of the Angels of Death begins as a young couple discover the remains of his mother in her mobile home. The rest of the family fall back, leaving them to reckon with the messy, unexpected death. By the time the burial is over, they understand this will always be their role: to liaise with death on behalf of people they love. They are living angels of death.
All the major events in their lives – births, medical emergencies, a move to a northern boomtown, the theft of a veteran’s headstone – are viewed from this ambivalent angle. In this shadowy place, their lives unfold: fleeting moments, ordinary occasions, yet on the brink of otherworldliness. In spare, heart-stopping prose, the transient joys, fears, hopes and heartbreaks of love, marriage, and parenthood are revealed through the lens of the eternal, unfolding within the course of natural life. This is a novel for everyone who has ever been happily married -- and for everyone who would like to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Brigs and Carrie discover Brigs' mother's decayed corpse, the couple finds themselves drafted into an unwanted role as the rest of the family relinquishes responsibility. This event proves a harbinger of what is come; again and again the young pair play involuntary psychopomps (guide of souls) for those around them. Old and unborn, none are immune to death's embrace; even as the couple works to establish their lives together, reminders of life's inevitable end, the ephemeral nature of all things, surround them. Cheerfully unsentimental, the work manages a surprising joyful tone for a novel obsessed with inexorable death, with the idea that to be born is to take the first step towards the grave. Told in the second person, the work is a song of praise to mono no aware, the pathos of transience. It nevertheless celebrates the sweet moments in life along with the bitter. It reminds readers that life is short but along the way are moments that can make it worthwhile, if one only takes the time to appreciate them. A striking examination of life and death, the work is a promising debut novel.
