From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers and Beach Read comes a sparkling novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations.

The effect is to produce a collage of speech and speechlessness, a story that sometimes slips away from you even while you are reading it, becoming a memento mori in form as well as content. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect when a poet writes a novel, and exactly the sort of thing you’ll devour if you like huge helpings of experimentation with your fiction.

It’s time once again for the annual series of postings we like to call Shadows and Reflections, in which our... But the book isn’t just about Wolf, it’s also about Death. Not just the process of life coming to an end, although that does feature heavily in the narrative, but the actual person who travels through the world moving people on from life to death. A rhythmic and powerful poetic meditation on death, life and love and the hidden mysteries of the universe; both playful and sombre, hilarious and human” At the end of this book, there is a little section where the reader can fill in the name of a loved one, so that the copy of Mrs Death Misses Death contains the reader’s own dead. If this particular text exists longer than we mortals, so too will the names of our loved ones. I can be a tough old bird. I can see how I might have found this mawkish and sentimental. But such is the curious power of this book that I wrote the name of my dad who met Mrs Death unexpectedly one night in November 2016. Miss you. You were great. The Title: I mean, who does not love a great title? This one was so fresh and such great play on words.

Following the earlier suggestion that we think of Death not as a male character, as we have been encouraged to in the past, we’re then asked to consider how strange it is that this was ever thought to be the case. Acclaimed poets from the US and the UK take centre stage in the final event as part of the spoken word poetry organisation’s 40th anniversary celebrations. The Premise: I can say I have never read a premise like this. Death herself gets someone to write a memoir about her life. INJECT THIS IN MY VEINS! I mean seriously, how utterly original is this premise. Clay by Melissa Harrison is published today by Bloomsbury. "Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone" says Robert Macfarlane....Not specific with pronouns when she writes Wolf, Godden gently nudges us to question assumptions of gender. After a few characters are revealed to be women, Godden pokes fun at the reader and challenges the assumption that titles such as Dr are more commonly used by men. We are reminded that Mrs Death is often pictured in a male guise – one of the things she’s clearly finding so exhausting. She’s tired of it, tired of male pronouns taking over the world when men are brought to death just the same as women. She’s tired of human brutality and not just men against women; in one instance she also marks the cruelty by a mother to her child. Godden makes a point of the horrors that the mother herself experienced, but again, makes no excuses for the treatment of her child. She sets out the story as it stands and allows the discomfort. Mrs Death Misses Death is a short novel, but is moving, and at times, difficult to read due to the subject matter. So as it might seem obvious, I was expecting fantasy but don't let the premise fool you, this book is full of surprises, twists, and turns. It is also an interesting combination of fiction and poetry.

I felt the first 25% of the book was phenomenal, the writing, introduction of characters, scenes and Mrs. Death narration was flawless. Then, it all started to wane. Death in itself is a very board topic, it’s been happening since the beginning of time- there are so many ways to explore the topic and I think that’s where the author (maybe even the editor) may have went wrong, she tried to do entirely too much instead of keeping it tighter and more focused. At one point I was like, “huh, how dis even drop in yasso?!!” that for me was a little infuriating. Mrs Death is tired and sad. Since the beginning of time she’s been the one to bring death to humans and to stand alongside them as they pass. She isn’t weary of the job – she sees it as a great privilege and an honour – but she’s tired in her soul. A beautiful, lyrical, and achingly brilliant story about love, grief, and family. Henry's writing will leave you breathless." —BuzzFeed I am Death. I am a glorified rubbish collector. I am a cleaner. I clean. I collect the spirits up and carry all those burdens away. Writing about the death of Prince and the simultaneous public outpouring of grief that usually follows the death of a celebrity, Godden spears the feeling of this particular type of loss, where art is the connective tissue between us and a stranger we felt we knew.

Opening Lines

Above I gushed about how strong a premise this book had. When I see a strong premise not strongly executed it makes me sad, maybe even a little mad because I know with tighter edits and stronger editor the book would have been great. Salena Godden has written a story that demands and deserves to be heard. Hypnotic and beautiful, tender and sad, Mrs Death Misses Death brings me life.

The novel is written in a hybrid form including poems, letters, diary entries, playscript-style dialogues, a transcript of Mrs Death undergoing psychiatric investigation and even a chapter narrated by a desk, found by Wolf in an antique shop, a desk that provides Wolf access to Mrs Death's stories. A modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic wit . . . This is not light-hearted stuff, yet Godden has produced a miraculously light-hearted novel . . . an elegant, occasionally uproarious, danse macabre - Guardian Salena Godden is known for the graphic power of her work and is one of the foremost poets in the UK, as well as an author and singer songwriter.Oh, I have been travelling. I time travel. I am a death tourist. I am witness. I am permitted. I can see every end, I go everywhere that Mrs Death goes and the places only Mrs Death can go when I am here and when I listen to The Desk.” Dark at times – with compelling stories about miscarriages of justice, murder and racial oppression – it is nonetheless celebratory and life-affirming, aglow with love, fortitude and compassion - Daily Mail Wolf's writing is often a bit repetitive and it feels like the author gets so fascinated and hooked by a certain idea that he needs to explore it to the fullest. There are many quotable parts in the book overall and Wolf shares a lot of thought-provoking ideas like when he explains to us how our society often refers to higher powers as male, but that Death is certainly female. Told in a laconic, compelling interior monologue, Weather follows the wide-ranging concerns of its librarian protagonist, Lizzie, from the quotidian – a painful knee, her son’s academic progress at school – to the profound – the election of Trump and a looming climate change disaster. Lizzie’s former university professor is now the popular host of an apocalyptic podcast, and Lizzie agrees to answer her conspiracy-filled mail from listeners. Written in deft, compact paragraphs, Offill’s novel balances insight with humour and a timely, ambient sense of anxiety.