A Better Angel

(Paperback)

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Description

In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering -illness, regret, mourning, sympathy - in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne'er-do-well paediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

With A Better Angel's cast of living and dead characters, at once otherworldly and painfully human, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit.

Author Bio

Selected by the New Yorker as one of the 20 Under 40, Chris Adrian is the author of Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and A Better Angel. He lives in San Francisco, where he is a Fellow in Paediatric Hematology-Oncology. He was awarded a New York Public Library Fellowship in 2011.