Author(s): Nancy Huston

Fiction

Already a critical success in France, Dolce Agonia is a scintillating dissection of modern life and death and love and friendship. A group of cosmopolitan friends in midlife gather in New England for a Thanksgiving dinner - and are trapped there when it snows. Sean, the Irish hard-drinking poet is their host, but hasn't told them he's dying of cancer. In fact none of them would be there if they didn't have the kind of dysfunctional lives and problems which prevent them being with their own families. With the exception of the enigmatic outsider, a new young trophy wife, they all know too much about each other. Relationships and histories criss-cross; they have little in common except a mutual past and a search for meaning in the present. And meanwhile they're all at the mercy of fate.