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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