The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself & was known—where she loved & was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time & of space, heading always west, & carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters & loses parts of her body & her self in one terrifying, hilarious, & heartbreaking situation after another. 

A bracing writer of great nerve & verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (& the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever & Then It’s Over plumbs mortality & how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest & funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.