Our Long Marvelous Dying

A Novel

By: Anna DeForest

Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed

Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

Palliative-care physician and award-winning author Anna DeForest returns with an ode to life and to death, and the ways we care for ourselves and others on our long, marvelous walk toward the end.

In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street.

Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn—endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives—no matter how little we live them.

Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death—and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.

©2024 Anna DeForest (P)2024 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

“DeForest draws from [their] own experience as a palliative care doctor to write with acute perception about the thin membrane that separates life from death. Readers of When Breath Becomes Air will want to add this to their shelf.”—Publishers Weekly

“An existential thriller—fast-paced, tender-hearted and brutally funny, this novel will haunt you long after you finish it. I would read DeForest on my deathbed.”—Jenny Offill, author of Weather

“Our Long Marvelous Dying solidifies Anna DeForest’s place as a cool and stylish prose master of striking and exquisite sentences that refuse to turn away from what others deny; a meditation on love and dying, grief and living, and the beautiful, shattering ways they are all entwined. I raced through this book with a heart-stricken propulsion, spellbound to the gutting last line. DeForest is a remarkable talent.”—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke