It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

Winner of The Novel Prize
Available to preorder now for March, 5 2024 release

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

"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
"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
"It Lasts Forever is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended." ~ Jeff VanderMeer

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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