Rhian Ellis, After Life

At the beginning of After Life there is a corpse to be disposed of: "First I had to get his body into the boat" runs the first sentence. The logistics of the body's disposal, the fear that it will be discovered once buried, the protagonist's dread of being found out, and the mystery of how Peter Morton came to be in this situation in the first place, wrongfully dead, form the tense backbone of Rhian Ellis's debut novel. But After Life is not so much a suspense novel—though it is suspenseful—as it is the slow unfolding of the life of the protagonist, Naomi Ash.

Naomi, a medium at the time of Peter's death, grew up as the daughter of a medium in New Orleans. There, ensconced in a dumbwaiter in her grandfather's house, Naomi would rap on the walls of her mother's séance room, doing her bit for the family business, or she would pretend to be the disembodied voice of some client's dead child. Later, mother and daughter moved north to a spiritualist colony in New York state, a town whose eccentric residents are, for the most part, psychics of one sort or another.

After Life is, in large part, a book about Naomi's relationship with her mother, both of them flawed, believable characters who are bound to one another by ineffably strong ties. It is also about how events, large and small—unkindnesses, deaths, thoughtlessness—can shatter one's happiness, and how survivors go on living nonetheless.