Bodies In Motion and At Rest

Nov 5, 2025 1:45 PM

Author:Thomas Lynch

The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these existential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us.'So writes Thomas Lynch in Bodies in Motion and at Rest - the second collection of essays by the award-winning author of The Undertaking.As poet and funeral director, Lynch examines the relations between the literary and the mortuary arts - the connection between obsequies and prosodies; the effort to give voice to unspeakable things: great love, great heartbreak, great wonder, great pain; how icons, metaphors and ritualised speech are engaged in poems and in funerals.The essays assembled here explore a species at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by merger and acquisition, numbed by maths and technologies, in search of the meaning of Life and Time, our lives and times. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech or pop-psyche terms, these wise, exquisite essays explore the distance between birth and death, the condition of the human being and the state of ceasing to be.

Reviews

Graham Masterton is the living inheritor to the realm of Edgar Allan Poe

—— San Francisco Chronicle

Masterton is a crowd-pleaser, filling his pages with sparky, appealing dialogue and visceral grue

—— Time Out

Graham Masterton is possibly horror's most consistent provider of chills

—— Master of Chills

Though Masterton is capable of conjuring a spooky atmosphere and evoking chills from understated terrors, more often than not he goes for the gut, building to splattery climaxes of physical terror

—— Publishers Weekly

Multifaceted and fascinating

—— Los Angeles Times

His books never fail to entertain

—— Booklist

Makkai takes several risks in her sharp, often witty text, replete with echoes of children's classics from Goodnight Moon to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as more ominous references to Lolita...the moving final chapters affirm the power of books to change people's lives even as they acknowledge the unbreakable bonds of home and family. Smart, literate and refreshingly unsentimental.

—— Kirkus

Rebecca Makkai takes all the best features of the children's books her characters love and sweeps them straight into her first novel: their warmth, their vibrancy, their joy at setting their inventions in motion and following them wherever they might lead. She is a generous, original, and arresting writer, and any story she wants to tell, I want to listen.

—— Kevin Brockmeier

She's a great writer...a wonderfully entertaining story packed with moral conundrums and beautiful writing

—— Patrick Neale, Jaffe & Neal Bookshops , The Bookseller

Ian is a little star. His many sayings and observations that he'll burst out with are endearing - and often funny. It's clear that Lucy is smitten by her favourite 'borrower.'

—— The Bookbag

This story - often fun, sometimes sad, always bookish - deals with big issues...Rebecca Makkai's literary debut will appeal to young adults and readers of adult literary fiction

—— We Love This Book

In Makkai's picaresque first novel, Lucy, a 26-year-old children's librarian, "borrows" her favorite patron, bright, book-loving 10-year-old Ian, after his fundamentalist parents enroll him in a program meant to "cure" his nascent homosexuality.

—— Booklist

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