The Hospice Singer

"You sing your songs and maybe you go for a walk or a beer, but at some point your brain must remind you that your audience is back there dying."

From the author of The Marriage Hearse, a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection, and The Handsome Sailor, a New York Times Notable Book, comes a new novel that explores the little-known world of hospice singing-home visit concerts for the dying-through the surprising relationship between one of the singers, 66-year-old Ian Nelson, and a beautiful young woman, Anita Richardson, to whom his choir sings.

Ian, retired from a career as a high school guidance counselor, long married, and the father of two, considers himself an ordinary man. He is intelligent, engaging, more attractive than he seems to know, and, as the son of a minister, determinedly moral. Meeting Anita threatens it all. His attraction and connection to this much younger woman-who, to complicate matters, is dying-upends his quiet New England life.

In richly detailed, finely honed prose threaded through with Larry Duberstein's characteristic humor and compassion, The Hospice Singer explores the hidden complexities of life in small town America.

Larry Duberstein was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with honors from Wesleyan University and was a Harvard Prize Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Since leaving academia, he has held parallel careers as an author and a builder, having published ten volumes of fiction and dozens of essays and short stories, and having built and remodeled hundreds of houses. In addition to his highly acclaimed fiction, Duberstein is the father of three highly acclaimed daughters. Among other distinctions, Duberstein's novels have twice been chosen as New York Times Notable Books, and his overall body of work earned him the 2020 Ewing Arts Award in Literature. He lives and works in rural New Hampshire with his companion-in-life Lee Brown.