"Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore." --Harper's Magazine A literary event--a major new novel by one of North America's most admired writers--her first in more than a decade. A daring novel about love and death and what lies between; a ghost story set in the 19th and 21st centuries; an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic) and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the 19th century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin both presumed dead but perhaps not dead at all . . . A meditation on what it means to be haunted by the past. To what extent--both in our national history and in the heart--does life persist on into death and vice versa? With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Moore deftly reveals how, even in death, it’s life that reverberates. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers, siblings and the stories we have all been told, which may or may not be true but that take us on a windswept, imagined journey into the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the Lorrie Moore Zone.