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I’ll start with: Moore’s one of my all-time fave authors, and I didn’t expect this to be a 3’ish read. That’s a little sad. Of her eight books, I’d put this one in eighth place. Damn. But oh well!

There are three parts here: there’s the scene between the protagonist and his dying brother Max in a hospice, there’s the civil-war era side-story that breaks up Finn’s story in small chapters that take the form of an older woman’s letters to her sister, and there’s the road trip taken by Finn and his ex Lily. This road trip is the main part, and it’s the section that makes the novel partly a “ghost story.� And it was the part I didn’t love. I enjoyed the other supporting sections far more. I won’t say why because it’s a new novel and to go into it would be to give information I’d rather people intending to read it not have.

I enjoyed listening to Moore’s voice though. I missed her easy authority and that funnysad charm of hers, which I think of as a gift. It doesn’t come from being a brilliant artist. You’ve either got it in your bones or don’t, and most people don’t. But Moore does. She’s rich with it, and it’s a comforting voice to read. She writes about death, loss, grief and heartache in a way that’s entirely unsentimental and very humane, and vivid.

Her characters in all her books across the four decades she’s been writing make jokes and use humour to skirt or stave off the pain of failed relationships, loneliness, illness, and the sheer weirdness of being alive on earth. In 2018 when I reread Birds of America I wrote, “They [the characters] grasp at humour like a life-preserver to cope with the absurdity of it all.� And in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the character Lily says at one point, “Jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life. They are the exit signs in a very dark room.� She used the same metaphor!!

This is classic Moore. Full of lightness and heaviness, and very playful. The final chapter is beautiful and wonderful.