Notes on Extinction - Softcover

Janice Deaner, an award-winning filmmaker, is the author of Where Blue Begins, The Body Spoken, and Notes on Extinction. She lives in New York City.

*Starred Review* The hero of Deaner's extraordinarily controlled and dramatic third novel, Will Mendelsohn, the son of Holocaust survivors, has been working on his magnum opus on world extinction for 10 years when a fire destroys his notes, manuscript, and marriage. In shock, Will turns to fieldwork and travels to disparate places, including India, where he stays with Mim, the widow of a tea grower. She and his mother became friends in a Nazi concentration camp, where they were both tortured. He and Mim grow close, but it is a blond, ice-eyed woman named Grace, married to an Indian neighbor and haunted by her own abusive past, who inspires Will to linger. Their intense affair is complicated by the eruption of political unrest and terrorist violence. Like Mim and his mother, Will is forced to experience the dark side of existence, a terrifying rite of passage that recalibrates his vision of the insistence of life even in the direst circumstances. Deaner's mesmerizing tale of loss and recovery explores the eroticism of pain with unflinching precision and provocative insight almost on a par with Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Bowen, and Michael Ondaatje. Donna Seaman
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