Matt Haig has written some wonderful books.
I recommend The Midnight Library especially and I was pleasantly surprised to find something new in The Life Impossible. Many authors embrace a certain vein but Matt Haig takes a step further with each new book.
Seventy-two-year-old Grace Winters is ready to call it a day. She is a retired, widowed math teacher mourning the death of her only child 30 years ago. Nothing will change. How could it and why in God`s name would she want it to?
She has come to terms with her grief and her passionless existence until a letter arrives from a woman she cheered up one lonely Christmas in 1979. One Christina van der Berg has bequeathed Grace a house in Ibiza … Ibiza, Spain; what on earth?
While she is semi-upside-down having, “Minimally invasive, radio frequency-based vein ablation surgery”, Grace decides to go.
Through the format of a story told to a former student in an email, she tells us of her impossible new life.
It’s a wonderful, humorous, often lonely journey of putting one foot in front of the other. Grace is braver than she expects. She goes diving at night in a tie-dyed bathing suit! She finds a mysterious jar of sea water that fills itself. Finding herself talking to a goat she starts to question her sanity.
Alone in a new place she seeks out people who knew her friend Christina, to try to find out what happened. How and why did Christina die? How did she know it was going to happen? Many things seem unanswerable … but they are.
Nothing she is expecting is there. Nothing we can possibly expect is there. What she finds is more than unexpected. She finds connections to people, to a place, to an unearthly source of strength and consciousness and thought that will save Ibiza.
It saved Christina.
It will save Grace.,
About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.