Death is literally in the title, so be fair warned that this isn’t always a nice and cozy story. There are discussions on real-life serial killers and their victims, which are graphic. They do not glamourize it but remind the reader that it happened. The author also discusses mental health, BLM, police brutality, and racism. I’ve often wondered how very different this living life would be if we were born with our expiry date stamped on our foreheads. I mean, if we knew exactly how long and little time we have left to love each other, maybe then we would be more kind and loving. Imagine if we knew our death date. How different we would live, maybe, and yes I know, maybe not. All the warmth and all the joy is boiled in a soup of memory, we stir the good stuff from the bottom of the pot and hold the ladle up, drink, we say, look at all the good chunks of goodness, take in your share of good times, good music, good books, good food, good laughter, good people, be grateful for the good stuff, life and death, we say, drink.

Salena Godden's pin-sharp ability to mine the intricacies of human nature fuels her long-awaited debut novel, a life-affirming and unflinching treatise on death and its stark realities. Always playful, infused with her trademark humour and commitment to truth, Godden reinvents the form while staying true to an emotional honesty that's as forthright as it is courageous. Mrs Death's finale is some of the most powerful writing I've read in years. Here is necessary, beautiful work. Thank God for Godden COURTTIA NEWLAND Salena Godden’s debut novel is as much an affirmation of life as a tale of death, writes Wendy Erskine. Truthfully, this book is an experience and I highly recommend giving it a try though I’m aware it certainly won’t be for everyone. The Title: I mean, who does not love a great title? This one was so fresh and such great play on words.Now, this book contains not just the dead Wolf may know of and that Mrs Death may mention, but the names each of you may want to remember here today. And in thefuture anyone who reads your copy of this book will read that handwritten name and speak it aloud. By the time Wolf reveals “But what if this passion and fury and all this writing were always just the ramblings of an imbalanced mind? What if everything I ever wrote and created was just my mania talking? What is real and what are just feelings? And which are real feelings or just hormones or chemicals in your body?” readers might well be skimming…

Salena Godden is featured on the Waterstones blog about writing her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, and how we respond to death across the country. Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Film and TV rights for M rs Death Misses Death have been optioned by Idris Elba’s production company Green Door Pictures. Godden has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize and the Ted Hughes Prize. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio, TV and film. Her poem Pessimism is for Lightweights is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.Mrs Death Misses Death: This is about you and me and us. This is her story, the story, the story of the life and the time of the death of us. This is the life of life and the time of time. For what a time it is and what a time it was and what a time it will be. The Dance of Time and Life and Death, the hours and the breath, the sky and space. The last big sleep. All your fears are here, all your fears are inside here. Mrs Death Misses Death is her debut novel and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. A BBC Radio 4 documentary following Godden's progress on the novel over twelve months was broadcast in 2018. In November 2020 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The novel then unfolds in a series of prose chapters ostensibly narrated by either Wolf or Mrs Death (with one chapter by the Desk) – albeit with the two’s stories coalescing (for example an interview with Mrs Death and a psychiatric seems to morph into Wolf being in hospital) – these being interleaved with copious poetry. Not specific with pronouns when she writes Wolf, Godden gently nudges us to question assumptions of gender. After a few characters are revealed to be women, Godden pokes fun at the reader and challenges the assumption that titles such as Dr are more commonly used by men. We are reminded that Mrs Death is often pictured in a male guise – one of the things she’s clearly finding so exhausting. She’s tired of it, tired of male pronouns taking over the world when men are brought to death just the same as women. She’s tired of human brutality and not just men against women; in one instance she also marks the cruelty by a mother to her child. Godden makes a point of the horrors that the mother herself experienced, but again, makes no excuses for the treatment of her child. She sets out the story as it stands and allows the discomfort.

Where I think the novel really succeeds is in balancing its two levels: the cosmic, in which Life and Death are sisters and Time is Death’s lover in a sort of creation myth; and the personal, in which Wolf’s family tree, printed at the end, is an appalling litany of accidental deaths and executions. It’s easy to see why Wolf is so traumatized, but Mrs Death, ironically, reminds him that, despite all of the world’s fallen heroes and ongoing crises, there is still such beauty to be found in life. Above I gushed about how strong a premise this book had. When I see a strong premise not strongly executed it makes me sad, maybe even a little mad because I know with tighter edits and stronger editor the book would have been great. Writing about the death of Prince and the simultaneous public outpouring of grief that usually follows the death of a celebrity, Godden spears the feeling of this particular type of loss, where art is the connective tissue between us and a stranger we felt we knew. Godden has created a meditation on the sheer amount of wasted life we are accustomed to accepting as part of the cost of living, the avoidable tragedies that are the byproduct of extractive capitalism. Just as resolutely as Godden writes about how death is inevitable, she underlines again and again that so many deaths are preventable and that these tragedies need not be repeated. Nut until we find another way to live, they will.When he sits at The Desk, he can hear Mrs Death’s words, songs, and poems. As the two work together, they form a close bond and have hope for humanity. This doesn’t read as clever or intelligent to me. Harambe? Is that supposed to be funny? It feels outdated.

The effect is to produce a collage of speech and speechlessness, a story that sometimes slips away from you even while you are reading it, becoming a memento mori in form as well as content. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect when a poet writes a novel, and exactly the sort of thing you’ll devour if you like huge helpings of experimentation with your fiction. Together Mrs Death and Wolf talk about the role of death in the world, the reasons why death happens, the people it happens to, and the effect it has on people. At times the book feels more like a stream of consciousness rather than a story, and there are sections written from Mrs Death’s point of view where we become swept up in her unique perspective. We get to see the world as she sees it, this being who has existed since the dawn of time, since humans took their first breaths. We see what hundreds of thousands of years of walking through the world unseen and ignored, crossing people over the threshold of death has done to her, how tired it has made her. But the book isn’t just about Wolf, it’s also about Death. Not just the process of life coming to an end, although that does feature heavily in the narrative, but the actual person who travels through the world moving people on from life to death. The actor-comedian and the poet advocate for their favourite books. Andi chooses The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary, Nikita loves Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden and Harriett goes for The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. One of my absolute favorite characteristics in books is WEIRDNESS. I’m exactly the target audience for experimental storytelling. The premise sounded awesome, but the execution just fell so short. The weirdness felt so surface level. It gave the book this Fake-Deep feel.

I believe this was supposed to be a unique, powerful 'story' told partially by the character of Death herself (yes a woman), and by a confusing character named Wolf. We get a couple other random commentary chapters thrown in for good measure but mostly it's about Wolf's struggles with mental health and the idea of why we live; and Death's remorse at having to take lives (plus some extensive comments on when people are 'misses' or nearly die). There could have maybe been a timeline set-up here that was manageable or could be followed; but the way the book is written it just gets lost. The tone of Mrs Death Misses Death is the equivalent of starting an essay with: ‘Good afternoon. My essay will cover the topic of X. In this essay, I will explore X, Y, and Z.’ …while also struggling to hit the required word count. It was somehow simultaneously convoluted and too on the nose. From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes Masters of Death, a story about vampires, ghosts, and death itself!