ABOUT THE BOOK

Dark, poetic, and chilling, 'A Prayer for the Dying' asks if it's possible to be a good man in a time of madness. Set in leafy Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, 'A Prayer for the Dying' opens harmlessly on a languid summer day; only slowly do events reveal themselves as sinister, bloom gently into a shared nightmare, as one neighbor after another succumbs to a creeping, always fatal disease.

Our sole witness to this epidemic is Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, a man with a large heart and conscience. As the disease engulfs his town, breeding hysteria, Jacob must find a humane way to save those he loves, short of calling a full quarantine and boarding up the sick in their houses. And what of the tramps slipping nightly through the tinder-dry woods, and the spiritualists from the city camped on the edge of town with their charismatic leader, Chase? Who will bury the dead properly, if not Jacob?

'A Prayer for the Dying' is a rare and scary book, Stewart O'Nan's most astounding achievement yet, a sunlit Gothic painted in shimmering prose that darkens and disturbs your complacency the further you go into it, until - as in the best Poe and Flannery O'Connor - there is no turning back. Here is confirmation of what some readers have known all along: Stewart O'Nan is not merely one of the best young novelists in America, but one of the finest novelists of our time.

Stewart O'Nan's first collection of stories, 'In the Walled City', won the Drue Heinz Literary Prize. He is the author of four previous novels, 'Snow Angels', 'The Names of the Dead', 'The Speed Queen', and 'A World Away'. He lives in Connecticut.