I’m setting this aside at 50%, I’ve been dragging my feet through this book for months, and I just don’t think my enjoyment will change. I’m totally disappointed. I was primed to love this. The Title: I mean, who does not love a great title? This one was so fresh and such great play on words.

While many deaths are featured, inevitably, as Wolf explains in his preface, this book does not mention every person that has ever died – if you wished this book to have mentioned another death, we can only apologise now in advance, for not knowing She is nobody and she is everybody. She is the homeless person begging for change outside the train station. Mrs Death is the spirit of the ignored and the saint of the betrayed. She is the first woman. Mrs Death is the first mother of all mothers. She is calling to us all now. She is weeping. She is cradling her crumbling world. She is holding this toxic and wounded planet to her cold breast. She is sitting next to you on the bus. She is amongst us. I got it wrong. Mrs Death is not the wife of Death. No. And she is not the mother of Death. No. She is Death, and she gets the final say. When he sits at The Desk, he can hear Mrs Death’s words, songs, and poems. As the two work together, they form a close bond and have hope for humanity.As someone who went to secondary school and sixth form college in Sussex but was unable to make it to university this is such a wonderful honour. Thank you to all at West Dean and Sussex University. Thanks also to my brother Gus and partner Richard who were there too . I send congratulations to my fellow Fellows: Sue Timney, Joanna Moorhead and Alexandria Dauley and congratulations also to all the amazing graduate students I met and chatted with that day.

Given the shape the past year has taken, a book with death in its title or between its covers might not seem like the obvious choice of reading material. However, the novel manages to uplift and reaffirm the power of connection and collectivism.Together Mrs Death and Wolf talk about the role of death in the world, the reasons why death happens, the people it happens to, and the effect it has on people. At times the book feels more like a stream of consciousness rather than a story, and there are sections written from Mrs Death’s point of view where we become swept up in her unique perspective. We get to see the world as she sees it, this being who has existed since the dawn of time, since humans took their first breaths. We see what hundreds of thousands of years of walking through the world unseen and ignored, crossing people over the threshold of death has done to her, how tired it has made her. Let's start with a couple things: this is not a novel, story or even really a narrative of any kind. Second, I skimmed the last half hoping for some semblance of an "ah-ha, I get it" moment; but sadly it never materialized. The voice of the furniture allows for these same insights into the pain of living to be developed whilst maintaining the light tone which eases the discomfort of truth. Mrs Death Misses Death should not, however, be dismissed as simply a darkly humorous book. Godden’s observations on mourning are particularly potent as she derives meaning from the mundane, from the objects we choose to keep to the way we might be innocently ‘ordinary’ in our unawareness of how our worlds will irrevocably change. Godden strikes the perfect balance between humour and effective insights into grief, trauma, living, and dying. A reader may tear up one moment and laugh the next, with levity never too far around the corner. Mrs Death herself is reluctant to allow her memoir to be transformed into a bleak work, preferring laughter and cheerfulness. Now, this book contains not just the dead Wolf may know of and that Mrs Death may mention, but the names each of you may want to remember here today. And in thefuture anyone who reads your copy of this book will read that handwritten name and speak it aloud.

Mrs Death Misses Death is not a normal kind of book. If you come to this expecting a prose story you’ll be a little surprised with what you find here, because it’s more like a series of poems and lyrical text that comes together to tell one story, but in a way that I’ve not really seen any other books do before. The narrative follows Wolf Willeford, a ‘Biracial, Bisexual, Bigender and Bipolar’ writer, who one day just before Christmas sees the perfect writing desk in the window of an antique shop that’s closing down; a desk that they know they need to help them with their writing; and a desk that once belonged to Mrs Death. The novel then unfolds in a series of prose chapters ostensibly narrated by either Wolf or Mrs Death (with one chapter by the Desk) – albeit with the two’s stories coalescing (for example an interview with Mrs Death and a psychiatric seems to morph into Wolf being in hospital) – these being interleaved with copious poetry.Above I gushed about how strong a premise this book had. When I see a strong premise not strongly executed it makes me sad, maybe even a little mad because I know with tighter edits and stronger editor the book would have been great. All the warmth and all the joy is boiled in a soup of memory, we stir the good stuff from the bottom of the pot and hold the ladle up, drink, we say, look at all the good chunks of goodness, take in your share of good times, good music, good books, good food, good laughter, good people, be grateful for the good stuff, life and death, we say, drink. And then he feels a cool presence nearby. Soon: “I am walking with Mrs Death and she shows me a London of layered worlds, the many worlds of before, and I hear the cries of far away and long ago. It is all here; I am both in the present and in the past. Mrs Death is vivid and by my side, narrating my world.”

Historical Look In the book Mrs. Death refers some deaths that made international news, or deaths that are still unsolved or you may not know about. I think getting a little history lesson within the book worked so seamlessly. The Premise: I can say I have never read a premise like this. Death herself gets someone to write a memoir about her life. INJECT THIS IN MY VEINS! I mean seriously, how utterly original is this premise. I’ve often wondered how very different this living life would be if we were born with our expiry date stamped on our foreheads. I mean, if we knew exactly how long and little time we have left to love each other, maybe then we would be more kind and loving. Imagine if we knew our death date. How different we would live, maybe, and yes I know, maybe not. Oh, I have been travelling. I time travel. I am a death tourist. I am witness. I am permitted. I can see every end, I go everywhere that Mrs Death goes and the places only Mrs Death can go when I am here and when I listen to The Desk.”

How many of these 100 Novels have you read?

I am here. Death is a woman. I am a woman. Surely by erasing me we have erased this power? By never portraying a woman as the representative of Death, the boss of Death, the figure of Death itself, one could debate that an important and fundamental disempowerment takes place. Perhaps this is what erasure looks like. Godden has created a meditation on the sheer amount of wasted life we are accustomed to accepting as part of the cost of living, the avoidable tragedies that are the byproduct of extractive capitalism. Just as resolutely as Godden writes about how death is inevitable, she underlines again and again that so many deaths are preventable and that these tragedies need not be repeated. Nut until we find another way to live, they will. One approach Godden used to condense the text was to turn what originally she wrote as essays into shorter poems, such as 'Mrs Death in Holloway Prison' featuring Sarah Reed's story, giving the reader time to pause, and think and to "say her name." This is a broken prose poem which begins: I'm sure there will be people out there that love this and think it truly bohemian and adore it's uniqueness. I am not one of those people in this instance.