Mortal Weather

“ Aphoristic and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It includes striking imagery and breathtaking moments of insight.”
— Dominic Wakeford, consulting editor, formerly at HarperCollins and Little Brown

After enduring the loss of his wife and surviving a near fatal accident at work, Stanhope Ellis decides he’ s ready for a change of scenery. Unfortunately, the people he meets in his new locale are dropping like flies, and he might be the reason.

As he struggles with whether he’ s Death Man or a cosmic witness, he meets a wise nurse, Gayathri Das, who helps him navigate the emotional minefield. But will she die, like the others?

Fondness for each of the characters is easy to come by, which is a hazard in a story where death comes calling so often. Each character’ s tale is filled with glimpses of ourselves and everyone we’ ve ever loved, compelling the reader to hear them out, maybe for the last time. It’ s a dizzying entanglement of friendship, grief, and perseverance from which there is no rush to be free. At once comforting and urgent, this book will fill your cup, break your heart, and put it back together, winking all the way.

A brilliant and memorable debut novel, Mortal Weather is an existential adventure — a timely, joyous examination of life and death with an against-all-odds love story at its core. The recurring themes read as a mystery, the characters are alive and memorable, and the writing is fluid and engaging. Here are all of our voices, asking all of our questions about the essence of life in trying times.

Among other things, Kevin Patrick McCarthy has been a geothermal geologist, a technical writer, a critic, and a screenwriter. His humor, essays, poetry, and fiction have been widely recognized. “Enough Sky,” the epigraph for Mortal Weather, was commended by The Poetry Society (UK) in 2014. He is a fourth-generation Coloradoan who now lives in the Pacific with his wife Tricia.