<p>“After my wife Elizabeth Church was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel she did not leave me.”</p> <p>Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax in an art gallery. The sparks are immediate leading quickly to a marriage that is dear erotically charged and brief. In Howard Norman’s spellbinding and moving novel the gleam of the marriage and the circumstances of Elizabeth’s murder are revealed in heart-stopping increments. Sam’s life afterward is complicated. For one thing in a moment of desperate confusion he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson known for the stylized violence of his films whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat-and-mouse game between the two men. For another Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth—not only seeing but holding conversations with her almost every evening and watching her line up books on a small beach. What at first seems simply a hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself evening by evening as something else entirely.</p> <p><i>Next Life Might Be Kinder</i> is a story of murder desperate faith the afterlife and love as absolute redemption—from one of our most compelling storytellers at the height of his talents.</p>