Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he's too emotional to teach history now. He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all. How lucky we are that we have Lorrie Moore's voice to reflect this lunatic world back to us and show us how to see it in all its devastating hilarity.' Lauren GroffFrom one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore's new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.

High up in a New York City hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality. It will prompt a questioning of life and death, grief and the past, comedy and tragedy, and the diaphanous separations that lie between them all.

'That Moore publishes so rarely is a gift in itself, because it compels you to read her over and over. . .