Samuel Ligon: Samuel Ligon is the author of Drift and Swerve (Autumn House 2009), and Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins 2003). His stories have appeared in more than 20 literary journals. He teaches at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and is the editor of Willow Springs.
"Ligon handles this latticework with impressive fluidity and
dramatic momentum, the disparate voices lacing the novel with the
melancholy of aborted and fractured love, whether between lovers or
between children and their parents. When a psychiatrist tells Mark
that "the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can't inhabit
or comprehend," we grasp that divide at the same time we question
whether anyone in this world is healthy." --New York Times Book
Review, Vu Tran " Ligon is able to move between characters--the
living, the dead, the barely-there, the unborn--and inhabit each
voice with a pace and precision that makes the prose move, too. He
begins by conducting the spare moments before a motorcycle crash
through the voice of one of its pregnant victims, and in the span
of three pages, orchestrates the thought-process of four other
characters, including the unborn baby, Isabelle, whose solitary
"Oh" delivers the single biggest understatement of the book, a
caustic pause before we become submerged in a narrative of returns
and remunerations, a postmodern ghost story set in New York City."
--The Brooklyn Rail "Lost love and complex human nature are at the
center of this novel about recovering from the past.... Ligon's is
a convincing presentation of human nature." --Foreword Reviews
"Ligon has pulled off an intricately interwoven novel that is both
a gripping page-turner and also a deeply felt exploration of the
most piercing kinds of pain." --New York Journal of Books
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