The End and Everything Before It (Finegan Kruckemeyer, Text)

Moving, profound and deeply layered, The End and Everything Before It is a soulful debut novel from award-winning playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer. Emma arrives in a small harbour after drifting alone on her boat for untold years; centuries before, Isaac inherits the land that will become the town and throws a feast; Nella and Alistair open a bookstore on the Main Street and grow old together; Connor escapes his work release program within the pages of books; and all of them have met an elusive stranger named Liz. Richly drawn characters converge across time and space, like captured moments pulled from a dream and layered together. They each settle in a small coastal town, their lives unfolding over generations, their stories linked through their connection to the founder, the prison on the hill, the house in the dunes and the forest that encircles it all. The arrival of each person is met with warmth and joy by those who encounter them, all strangers embraced as friends, while the grief of each departure is regarded with hopeful pragmatism as it offers a new road for a character to travel. Written with multiple viewpoints and voices and, at times, as a stream of consciousness, this meditation on loss, grief, the afterlife and our relationship with it delivers a hopeful message in the wake of sadness and is a beautifully rendered approach to life, death, the end and everything before. With echoes of Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland and Max Porter’s Grief Is a Thing with Feathers, this novel is a triumphant melding of time and place, grief and love, and above all, the strength of the human spirit to counter tragedy with hope and endure.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Kate Frawley is a former bookseller and a librarian in training. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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