Not All Dead Together

(Paperback)

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Not All Dead Together is a sweeping saga that chronicles the lives of family members brought together by blood and by choice over decades of violent sociopolitical conflict and exploitative foreign relations between the United States and Guatemala.

Through lyrical, richly detailed narratives told from multiple perspectives over a period of 65 years, we meet an ensemble cast of characters at critical points in their lives. Miguel, a physician at a neighborhood clinic in Guatemala, must immediately treat a boy who shot his own hand. Years earlier, his sister, Aleta, strives to improve the lives of her indigenous neighbors despite relentless systemic injustices and the constant threat of state-sponsored terror. A rudderless young Peace Corps volunteer named Gray finds the familial connection she craves in caring and perceptive Aleta, brilliant Miguel, their guileful brother, Carlos, and their kindhearted mother, Doa Paz. As the characters' paths intertwine, all question the direction of their lives in a world where the political and personal are inextricable and their choices can have life-or-death consequences.

Master storyteller Lynn Stansbury creates a vivid and intimate portrait of how the Guatemalan Civil War a horrendous era in foreign policy that the U.S. rarely confronts upended the lives of ordinary people and continues to perpetuate harm across generations. At once fierce and tender, Not All Dead Together wrestles with complex questions on the meaning of heroism, resilience, and found family.

Reviews

In Not All Dead Together, Lynn Stansbury weaves together past and present, gringa and Guatemalan, to dazzling effect. Her novel in stories is a fierce and poignant exploration of friendships over time, of friendships formed in the grip of history. As one character says, "The past is always there." I couldn't stop turning these vivid pages which took me to so many dark corners, so many shining moments.
-Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven

Steeped in the richness of history and culture, Not All Dead Together is a story of family relationships, the families we were born into and the families we build over time...Stansbury is adept at bringing a range of characters to life - an adolescent girl in Paris who later serves in the Peace Corps, the young Guatemalan woman who becomes her lifelong friend, a physician in Guatemala, a traumatized Mayan girl, a priest who disrupts the lives of the people he wants to help - and endows each with a distinct personality and complex humanity that make you feel for even the most flawed. No small feat. Not All Dead Together is a truly accomplished work.
-Barbara Westwood Diehl, Founding and Managing Editor of The Baltimore Review

Lynn Stansbury focuses on the frailties, frustrations, and precariousness of ordinary lives as they struggle to find meaning during a disorienting, dangerous, and destabilizing civil war...With this thought-provoking and bracing novel, Stansbury deftly makes evident her psychological acuity and powers of observation. Not All Dead Together deserves a wide and discerning readership.
-Harvey Grossinger, author of The Quarry

Like Chekhov, Lynn Stansbury writes from a tonic mind and a large heart. She explores her characters with superb psychological and emotional intensity as they struggle to survive in a world of political upheaval and violence. In prose that is at once gritty and sensuous, incisive and generous, Stansbury introduces the reader to a doctor doing surgery in crude conditions while in fear for his life, a young and bewildered Peace Corps volunteer stuck in a doomed marriage, and a vulnerable Mayan girl whose memory is temporarily lost to trauma. Stansbury...provides considerable compassionate insight into her characters' variously fraught lives.
-Margaret Meyers, author of Dislocation

Author Bio

Lynn Stansbury is a writer and a semi-retired community medicine physician who has lived and worked all over the world, but came of age in Guatemala as a Peace Corps volunteer during the Vietnam War. She now lives in Seattle, where she reviews fiction for TheBaltimore Review, and she and her husband keep tabs on family in California and New Zealand.