The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.

Anne de Marcke will be here to discuss her book with us at bookhaus. Tickets cost £6 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink and £2 off the book. Presented by bookhaus.

‘It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a work of quietly detonative imagination. Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate. As the heroine wanders a shattered world, clutching a dead crow that is still muttering away, she becomes an incarnation of grief – its numbness and regrets and heartbreaks – and of the inevitability of our decline: we are what we lose. Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human.’
— The 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2024 Panel

‘[A] soul-stirringly expansive novel, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, classic dramatic structures – introduction, rise, climax, fall, resolution – are distended, and linger after the curtains close.… By resisting endings, de Marcken’s deeply imaginative novel reflects that world – our collective story.’
— Kate Simpson, Telegraph

‘It is simply glorious. Zombie existence has its poetics; it critiques its own definitions…. [And] these zombies genuinely try to communicate with one another: their conversations are relayed with an almost Beckettian skill, and are very funny – very bathetic, very heartbreaking – indeed. Anne de Marcken’s success has been to write a zombie novel that is not in any sense about zombies as we’ve previously given them permission to be. Here they are struggling, just like us, to reject the cultural baggage and separate what is really happening from what is not. They are working to own themselves and be proud. As a sly tour of the slow-motion disaster of the Anthropocene, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over captures and concentrates the energies of all of us listeners at the zombie hotel.’
— M. John Harrison, Times Literary Supplement

‘Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.’
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

‘It Lasts Forever is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended.’
— Jeff VanderMeer, author of Dead Astronauts

Entry requirements: no age restrictions — Read more — Read less