But Mrs Death has reached exhaustion and saturation – despite all the technology and communication available to mankind what she and her lover Time and sister Life had expected to be a quiet 21st Century, instead she has to control her sister’s Life fecundity and also deal with greater than ever untimely death “war and deconstruction, famine and murder”. A rhythmic and powerful poetic meditation on death, life and love and the hidden mysteries of the universe; both playful and sombre, hilarious and human - NIKESH SHUKLA Mrs Death Misses Death: This is about you and me and us. This is her story, the story, the story of the life and the time of the death of us. This is the life of life and the time of time. For what a time it is and what a time it was and what a time it will be. The Dance of Time and Life and Death, the hours and the breath, the sky and space. The last big sleep. All your fears are here, all your fears are inside here. Godden strikes the perfect balance between humour and effective insights into grief, trauma, living, and dying. A reader may tear up one moment and laugh the next, with levity never too far around the corner. Mrs Death herself is reluctant to allow her memoir to be transformed into a bleak work, preferring laughter and cheerfulness. Together Mrs Death and Wolf talk about the role of death in the world, the reasons why death happens, the people it happens to, and the effect it has on people. At times the book feels more like a stream of consciousness rather than a story, and there are sections written from Mrs Death’s point of view where we become swept up in her unique perspective. We get to see the world as she sees it, this being who has existed since the dawn of time, since humans took their first breaths. We see what hundreds of thousands of years of walking through the world unseen and ignored, crossing people over the threshold of death has done to her, how tired it has made her.

Godden brings her poetic skills in writing this amusing story, of Mrs. Death unburdening her story to Woof Willeford, a struggling author who buys a magic desk. Through the desk, Mrs. Death takes Woof with her while she explains her story. I listened to the audio narrated by the author herself. She tells her story in a stream-of-conscious format which works well with her poetic skills. Following the earlier suggestion that we think of Death not as a male character, as we have been encouraged to in the past, we’re then asked to consider how strange it is that this was ever thought to be the case. Honoured by this role, Wolf’s relationship to Mrs Death forms the basis of the story, in addition to containing elements of Death’s own writings. Moving between the dawn of time to the present day, Mrs Death Misses Death interrogates the big questions we ask about dying whilst also focusing on the personal, through stories from the Willeford family tree. A family of monkeys feel loss when they lose a member of their group. The killing of Harambe! Why did they kill Harambe? Why don’t we respect and save the animals, Mrs Death? What will we do when the last elephants are extinct, Mrs Death? Who will save the turtles and the coral reefs and the rainforests? She is nobody and she is everybody. She is the homeless person begging for change outside the train station. Mrs Death is the spirit of the ignored and the saint of the betrayed. She is the first woman. Mrs Death is the first mother of all mothers. She is calling to us all now. She is weeping. She is cradling her crumbling world. She is holding this toxic and wounded planet to her cold breast. She is sitting next to you on the bus. She is amongst us. I got it wrong. Mrs Death is not the wife of Death. No. And she is not the mother of Death. No. She is Death, and she gets the final say.I have never read a book like this before. This book skillfully combines prose and verse in a very engaging way. I would love to listen to this as an audiobook. The most mystical, brilliant, and otherworldly book about death I've read since... high school? Wow, this book speaks about blood memory, time, death and of course life in ways I haven't experienced before. I'll keep saying it, poets who crossover to novels don't play fair!

The actor-comedian and the poet advocate for their favourite books. Andi chooses The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary, Nikita loves Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden and Harriett goes for The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Godden does not leave her reader dismayed as she ultimately concludes that living is a ‘glorious mess’ and knowing that we are alive should make us live as even better people. Mrs Death Misses Death is an irresistible novel which speaks equally to the act of living as it does to the inevitability of dying. I am Death. I am a glorified rubbish collector. I am a cleaner. I clean. I collect the spirits up and carry all those burdens away. A modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic wit . . . This is not light-hearted stuff, yet Godden has produced a miraculously light-hearted novel . . . an elegant, occasionally uproarious, danse macabre - GuardianAt the end of this book, there is a little section where the reader can fill in the name of a loved one, so that the copy of Mrs Death Misses Death contains the reader’s own dead. If this particular text exists longer than we mortals, so too will the names of our loved ones. I can be a tough old bird. I can see how I might have found this mawkish and sentimental. But such is the curious power of this book that I wrote the name of my dad who met Mrs Death unexpectedly one night in November 2016. Miss you. You were great. This, the debut novel by poet and performance artist Salena Godden (see here for perhaps her best known work Red- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My85d...) certainly fits that billing.