It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.

The heroine of the spare and hauntingIt Lasts Forever and Then Its Overis voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was knownwhere she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.

A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the readers mind) with throwaway assurance.It Lasts Forever and Then Its Overplumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the readers imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

Paperback, March 5th 2024