Life, and Death, and Giants

A Novel

By: Ron Rindo

Narrated by: Christina Moore, Johnny Heller, Roger Wayne, Will Damron

A heart too big for this world. A life that changes everyone.

"Life, and Death, and Giants is an intriguing and alluring novel from beginning to end. The events are startling, sad, amusing, invigorating, and informative. Reading it is like meeting a family that you never knew existed and becoming close friends in a few weeks. Highly recommended."—Jane Smiley, author of Lucky and A Thousand Acres

This program features multicast narration.

Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing eighteen pounds and measuring twenty-seven inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken in by his devout Amish grandparents who disapprove of all the attention and hide him away from the English world.

But it’s hard to hide forever when you’re nearly eight feet tall. At seventeen, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach. What happens next transforms not only Gabriel’s life but the lives of everyone he meets.

Life, and Death, and Giants is a moving story of faith, family, buried secrets, and everyday miracles.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press

©2025 Ron Rindo (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Straddling the Wisconsin of the Amish and “English,” Life, and Death, and Giants assays the limitations and temptations of the godly and the worldly. Ron Rindo has fashioned a small-town novel as magical and moral as a tall tale."–Stewart O’Nan, author of Snow Angels and Songs for the Missing

"With Life, and Death, and Giants, Ron Rindo has performed literary magic. This is a remarkable, profoundly moving novel."–Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948

"Like all the best tall-tales, legends, and folk stories, the size and skill of the hero matters to the narrative. But what matters more is the hero’s heart, and their willingness to sacrifice for a greater good to show their community and indeed, their country, what is possible, what is virtuous, what is best. The big beating heart of this novel is Gabriel Fisher, a 21st Century Paul Bunyan. But even more than Fisher is the book’s writer, Ron Rindo, who has crafted a novel that is remarkably generous, kind, and graceful. This is a novel that still believes in magic, goodness, and everyday heroes."—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and A Forty Year Kiss

This was a BEAUTIFUL read!

I absolutely loved everything about this book… the narrators, the story line, the emotions just welled up inside of me!

The voices were perfect!

The story was so heartbreaking and heartwarming . What a wonderful story and lovely characters . I would love to know them all personally

Very touching, incredible writing

I adored this book. I went into it somewhat blind and found the individual stories to be incredibly captivating and how they all leave together was really well written. Life is complicated and this book makes those complications feel very human and almost magical.

Beautiful and Poignant Story

Fantastical story based in a reality.
I think I may have enjoyed this book more because I grew up in an area that would have neighbored the fictional Lakota. I knew the Amish community well from a distance.
The vocal actor who did Hannah’s voice had a cadence very much like my own grandmother’s.
All in all the story will be one I’m sure I will revisit.

A Hymn to Living Beings, Tall and Small

This was a lovely book which highlighted the way our life paths bring us together in unimagined and unpredictable ways. The author also reminds us how we often originally consider a certain person or situation as odd or weird and later recognize them as stunningly, beautiful.

The authors use of the natural world was my favorite part of the book. From the Amish community’s point of view, from the protagonist, Gabriel‘s point of view, from the veterinarian doctors point of view, she kept bringing farm animals, birds, and insects to the fore. It was beautifully done. I appreciated that the author treated the Amish family and community with such respect and also showed that even the most pious may reconsider and either reject or recommit to their original beliefs. It is a personal decision. she made them human and flexible at least in this fictional version of an event.

Spoiler alert:
Because of my medical background I have to say that it is unbelievable that someone - even a
Veterinarian- would not realize the likelihood of a pituitary tumor years earlier in Gabriel‘s life. There would be no big mystery about why a young child would grow so tall so soon and once the eyesight issues were mentioned, well…Gigantism and its cause has been well known for a very long time. But for the sake of the story, one has to let these things pass.