My Life with Corpses — Wylene Dunbar

Wylene Dunbar blends a sharply defined reality with a soaring, surreal leap of imagination in the story of an enigmatic narrator we know only as Oz, a Kansas girl raised by a family of dead people. Oz tells how she survived her childhood only to face new dangers: the terrible risks of having feelings and the discovery that her family were not the only dead people walking around looking as if they were alive.

Both a triumph and a cautionary tale, My Life with Corpses calls to mind the absurd and compelling world of Samuel Beckett's work, or the quirky grace that characterizes the writing of contemporaries such as Aimee Bender, Julia Slavin, or Jonathan Safran Foer. Narrated with an irresistible combi-nation of intellect, irony, and outright sorcery, Oz's story shows us how life can seep treacherously away but also how it can be restored again.