Who's Who in Hell — Robert Chalmers

Written with a keen eye and enormous heart that calls to mind early Roddy Doyle, Who's Who in Hell is an uproarious, achingly moving story about what happens when our plans for life meet its plans for us. Daniel Linnell is a charming but rather hapless young Londoner who falls for Laura, a no-nonsense American who likes to parachute out of planes and doesn't like the word love. Meanwhile, he's found a new job as an obituarist and is immediately initiated into life at the paper: the pecking order of obits vs. news reporters vs. the sports desk; the annual drunken ritual called the Obituaries Outing; and the unexpurgated obits of the less-than-angelic that his eccentric editor keeps in a hollowed-out Lives of the Saints. Daniel begins to write Who's Who in Hell -- a mammoth compendium of the evil and damned -- and gets a publishing contract. He goes to Kansas to meet Laura's dysfunctional family. Things are going beautifully -- but it's always then that things have a way of changing.