It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

Winner of The Novel Prize
Available to order now.

New Directions (US) • Fitzcarraldo (UK) • Giramondo (AU) • Gallimard Scribe (FR) • Suhrkamp (GR)

"Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands." ~ Alexandra Kleeman

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. 

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"Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then—with prose as elegant as it is spooked—tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut." ~ Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
"It’s wry and moving and very beautiful." ~ Susie Mesure for The Spectator
"Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands." ~ Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
"Long and short, it’s hard to imagine a more erudite zombie story. This is de Marcken’s central trope⎯and her triumph. She seizes the gut-smeared cliches of The Walking Dead and recomposes them as a philosophical odyssey. Better yet, despite her fiction’s core seriousness, its quest for the Real, her undead stumble through a Grand Guignol farce." ~ John Domini for The Brooklyn Rail
"From Fitzcarraldo Editions comes another soon-to-be classic to add to their growing list, this time in the spectral form of It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over—a strange, haunting novel by Anne de Marcken, whose acerbic voice breathes new life into the fictional possibilities of the undead." ~ Joshua Rees for Buzz
"It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended." ~ Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy
"Anne de Marcken's It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is a superb and feral work, moving without hesitation through grief, through dust, and therefore through time. The sighing soil, oh. It is a soft rumination, a devastating ode to lateness, solitude, yearning. To the fleeting body. It is a quiet thing filled with contradictions—about movement and then stillness, or about rows upon rows of objects, planted or felled; about repetition. Are we not all planted or felled? I located myself on this crossing. I will return to it more, more. A gem." ~ Giada Scodellaro, author of Some of Them Will Carry Me
"A soul-stirringly expansive novel [...] Here classic dramatic structures—introduction, rise, climax, fall, resolution—are distended, and linger after the curtains close. By resisting endings, de Marcken’s deeply imaginative novel reflects that world—our collective story." ~ Kate Simpson for Telegraph ~ Five Stars
"...a sharp and weighty depiction of what does and doesn’t make someone human." ~ Publishers Weekly