About The Book
DEATH IS NOT THE END. FOR GRACE McGILL IT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
When people die alone and undiscovered, it’s her job to clean up what’s left behind – whether it’s clutter, bodily remains or dark secrets.
When an old man lies undetected in his flat for months, it seems an unremarkable life and an unnoticed death. But Grace knows that everyone has a story and that all deaths mean something more.
My Review
With thanks to the publisher for the copy received. Most people will at sometime in their career will be unhappy with their working life. But if they were to compare their job to Grace’s they might think about things differently. Her job was definitely one that I couldn’t do and I felt a huge relief that I couldn’t smell as I read. Her job was to clean the homes of those who had died alone and were undiscovered for a long time. She found comfort in her work, knowing that she made it easier for any loved ones but also felt anger, frustration and sadness that they had died alone. But she also became obsessive, not willing to let things go, to the extent that despite her promise to George the cat that she wouldn’t take the job home it was all she thought about. Her job was everything to her and in her determination to find answers about a missing teenage girl decades ago she placed herself in danger.
Grace has a lot in common with the people whose homes she cleans. She is one of the loneliest characters I’ve come across in fiction. A difficult relationship with her abusive father, at first her only real friend is her cat who she seemed to regard as human in many ways. Later in the novel she does make a friend, but this is a difficult relationship. The reasons for this are very clear, to the reader by the time she meets him, but her friend has no idea what Grace is actually like.
Grace was a character who affected me in many ways. She made me laugh but also left me feeling sad at her loneliness and the way she only had confidence in company when using an alias to help her find the truth. She was also a character who was impossible to dislike, even in the second half of the novel.
This is definitely one of the strangest novels that I have read and parts of it affected me deeply. It is difficult to say why, the less you know about the storyline the more you appreciate it. But, I can say that I think it will make many people be there for others more.
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