About this item
With the quiet precision of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roach's Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her father's mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town. "The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . " Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her father's mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subject's life.Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that Petroleum is crumbling away - a process that began twenty years ago when an accident in the grain elevator killed a beloved high school athlete.
About the Author
Susan Henderson is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the author of two novels, Up from the Blue and The Flicker of Old Dreams, both published by HarperCollins. Susan lives in New York and blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com.
