Death of an Ordinary Man

by Glen Duncan (London: Scribner, 2004)

“He’d had glimpses of it, what the household had, the way the kids smelled after their baths, the reflexive ease of shared flesh and blood, the love and sex at the heart of the marriage like a furnace heating the whole place.”

When Death of an Ordinary Man starts, Nathan Clark, a retired history teacher and amateur archaeologist from Devonshire, has woken up dead. It is the day of his own funeral, and he is able to move unseen around his family and friends as they mourn, listening in on their conversations and even their thoughts. Nathan has no idea how or why he died and spends the rest of the book trying to work this out, while his wife Cheryl, father Frank, best friend Adrian and teenage children Luke and Gina attempt to come to terms with his death. As he goes back in time to crucial moments in his life, including the haunting disappearance of his youngest daughter Lois, Nathan’s memories become darker and more frightening – there are no angels in this afterlife, just a room in his house that he never knew was there, with a mysterious door he feels compelled to open. This is a sad, thoughtful work of literary fiction and a deeply moving portrait of family life.


Read a biographical essay written by the author in the New York Times here.

Room

by Emma Donoghue (New York: Little, Brown, 2010)

“All our relatives, you’re related to them now too,” says Grandma. “What’s ours is yours.”

Room is narrated by five-year-old Jack, who has been kept in the same small space since the day he was born. Jack and his mother never go outside, and never see anybody except Old Nick, the man who keeps them prisoner, so they have come to rely on each other for everything. After an exhilarating escape from the confines of their old life, Jack and Ma must adjust to being Outside, and Jack has to accept that the strange new world – our modern environment – he now inhabits is safe and real. An original and suspenseful work of literature, Room is often disturbing but always compelling, a story that at its heart is about the strength of a mother’s devotion to her child.

Visit Jack and Ma’s Room here.