BookExpoCast

May 23, 2008

Joe O’Connell On Evacuation Plan: A Novel from the Hospice

Joe O’Connell is an author and journalist who writes film columns for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle.

In O’Connell’s new book, Evacuation Plan: A Novel from the Hospice, Matt, a fledgling screenwriter, volunteers to work with the terminally ill in exchange for a good plot for his next script. He meets the people who work, die, and mourn in this world of last moments.

In the novel-in-stories style of Tim O’Brien’s July July and Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, O’Connell’s characters in Evacuation Plan reveal themselves in poignantly unfolding stories: the gambler who played a risky game involving his wife and his ex-con father; the mortician who was an unwed father-to-be; the daughter whose dying father has no clue about the night her world spun out of control; the nurse who lived among aging neighbors and struggled to hold her own family in place; the drunk who magically encountered himself as a boy. Forgiveness, joy, making the final leap. Evacuation Plan is the story of a world in which the clock ticks off the final moments for all of us and makes of those moments a lifetime.

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