The Baltimore Book of the Dead

“This book is both brief and miraculous, and it will be finished before you’re ready to let it go. Like life.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth

When Cheryl Strayed was asked by The Boston Globe to name a book she finds herself recommending time and again, she chose The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Now, a decade later, that beloved book has a moving companion volume. The Baltimore Book of the Dead is a new collection of portraits of the dead, weaving an unusual, richly populated memoir of compressed narratives.

Approaching mourning and memory with intimacy, humor, and an eye for the idiosyncratic, the story starts in the 1960s in Marion Winik’s native New Jersey, winds through Austin, Texas, and rural Pennsylvania, and finally settles in her current home of Baltimore.

Winik begins with a portrait of her mother, the Alpha, introducing locales and language around which other stories will orbit: the power of family, home, and love; the pain of loss and the tenderness of nostalgia; the backdrop of nature and public events. From there, she goes on to create a highly personal panorama of the last half century of American life.