Author:Thomas Lynch
Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve essays is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living and the living who have dies' with the same outrage and amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave-markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.
These craggy "life studies," forged during his years in the "dismal trade," are always forceful, authentic and full of a kind of ethical and esthetic clarity.
—— Richard Bernstein , New York TimesA truly persuasive evocation of artistic France in the last war... A brilliant recreation of a lost period
—— John Fowles, Books of the Year , GuardianA remarkable and very good writer... Everett writes with a rare vividness. He takes a sensuous pleasure in what he sees, and he has a fine ability to translate this into words that have the immediacy of one of Matisse's paintings
—— Allan Massie , ScotsmanAn extraordinary feat of historical and artistic imagining
—— Anton Nickson , Time OutMythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. . . . The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice.
—— BooklistFor ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 'As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance'
—— New York Times Book Review