Next Life Might Be Kinder
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
This haunting story of love and the aftermath of a murder is “a complex literary novel and a page-turner that’s impossible to put down” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
Sam Lattimore met Elizabeth Church in an art gallery in 1970s Halifax. But their brief, erotically charged marriage was extinguished with Elizabeth’s murder.
Since that traumatic loss, Sam’s life has grown complicated. In a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films. Soon he comes to regret his decision, leading to an increasingly intense game of cat and mouse between the two men. Furthermore, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth—not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and what at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.
Next Life Might Be Kinder is a “riveting” novel (The Washington Post) by a two-time National Book Award nominee, the acclaimed author of The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter—and features “an opening sentence worthy of the Noir Hall of Fame” (The New York Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This somewhat far-fetched but nonetheless entertaining novel set in 1973 by Norman (The Bird Artist) involves a young man's struggles to overcome his grief and rage. Thirtysomething Sam Lattimore, a novelist who has published his debut title and struggles to write his second one, lives at a Halifax hotel with his younger wife Elizabeth Church, a Ph.D. candidate writing her dissertation on the British author Marghanita Laski and her 1953 novel The Victorian Chaise-Lounge. While taking lindy dance lessons without Sam, Elizabeth partners with Alfonse Padgett, "a psychopathic thug in a bellman's uniform." After he assaults her and later Sam, the couple files a complaint with the hotel security, and the vengeful Padgett soon retaliates by fatally shooting Elizabeth. The devastated Sam begins his psychiatric sessions with the older Dr. Nissensen (these sessions form the opening of the book), in which Lattimore reveals he talks to Elizabeth's spirit when they meet on the beach at night. Meanwhile, broke and confused by his grief, Sam sells the movie rights to Elizabeth's lurid murder story to Peter Istvakson, an ambitious and "egotistical" film director. While Istvakson and his production crew shoot the movie on location in Halifax, he harasses the increasingly agitated Sam with personal questions about his marriage to juice up the movie's realism pushing Norman's bittersweet yarn to a violent climax.
