Admittedly I didn’t quite know what to expect from this novel going in, but it certainly wasn’t a profound meditation on grief as told through the metaphor of the insatiable hunger of the undead. This is an elegiac sort of dystopia, a reckoning with the state of being left behind, out of time, unmoored from meaning and purpose except perhaps the hunger, the grief. What would it take to denounce that hunger, to find peace with the black hole inside of you? What would you do then? How would you decide to move and where would you go? Anne de Marcken flips the trope of the desperate trudge through an apocalyptic landscape into a spiritual pilgrimage. Exquisite.