The Other Side of Air
A Novel
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
From Jeanne Braselton, author of the crtically acclaimed A False Sense of Well Being comes an irresistible new novel about the power of enduring love, poignantly told by an unforgettable narrator who’s watching from her place on “the other side of air.”
Katy Doyal has loved her husband, Ephraim, since their very first meeting in Rome, Georgia, when she was eight years old. Now, realizing that her time on earth is slipping away, Katy is determined to leave behind an orderly life and enlists the help of a stranger–a middle-aged, robust, wild-haired woman named Rose–to become a caretaker to her dear, dotty curmudgeon. After Katy passes, Ephraim is surprised to notice that his grief is easier to bear thanks to the arrival of this outsider. Even Katy, observing the events from the great beyond, is pleased.
If only Katy and Ephraim’s only child, Wyatt, could be so accepting. After moving to California to start his own life, Wyatt is still unable to escape his feelings of insecurity and exclusion from his parent’s ironclad union–a neediness that endangers his own marriage, and threatens to overshadow his mother’s death and upstage his father’s mourning.
But Rose isn’t about to let anything distract her from her sacred mission. And Katy–watching her family embracing life and love again–knows she needs to let go before she can earn “her wings.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A deceased Georgia librarian reaches out from beyond the grave to dote on her husband of 60 years in Braselton's posthumous second novel (after A False Sense of Well Being). Katy and Ephraim Doyal loved each other to the exclusion of everyone, including their son, Wyatt, whose resentment of his third-wheel status threatens his own marriage. When Katy is diagnosed with congestive heart failure, she worries Ephraim will sink into a depression after she is gone and die of loneliness. To this end, she arranges for Rose Callahan, a loud and brassy workhorse who, like Ephraim, was traumatized by a childhood of grinding poverty, to step in once Katy has passed to "the other side of air." Narrating the novel from the afterlife la The Lovely Bones, Katy also communicates with her son and husband, attempting to foster a reconciliation between the two. Although the plot is slight and the Southern patois is cumbersome, the novel abounds in wise truths about the indignities of aging and dying, the fragility of life and happiness and the durability of love. The author's 2003 death her friend, the novelist Kaye Gibbons, completed the novel and contributed an afterword adds a poignant prescience.
