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A Novel
by Amy Fusselman
Surprise, you're dead! This hilarious and moving novel follows a couple forced into unthinkable challenges when, after dying in a plane crash, they find themselves in the lowest tier of heaven, filled with laughter and dread, fear and acceptance, and family bonds even death can't break.
Following a catastrophic plane crash, married couple Mam and Bunko have found themselves in Cloud Six. It's the newest, and lowest, tier of heaven, run by a slumlord demon named Widdershins who takes the form of an underwear model. With a rabbit skeleton as their guide, the pair do their best to remain hopeful and together in their quest: to navigate the strangest of places, to find help, and to catch even one glimpse of the teen daughter they left behind.
While Mam and Bunko try to accept their fate, Widdershins navigates workplace politics and tries to impress an ex lover. And Amy, who appears in the book as our guide and scribe, grapples with how to tell an honest story with Satan breathing down her neck.
Cloud Six is Amy Fusselman at her most original and heartfelt, offering a blistering yet humorous take on the many trials of contemporary life, including parenting, substance abuse, depression, gun violence, and climate change.
"Leave it to Amy Fusselman to hold a cracked mirror to our world—neglected, mismanaged, unsteady, prone to random violence—and call it heaven. As absurd as it is tender, as hilarious as it is dreadful, Cloud Six is yet another sui generis work of brilliance from a writer at the height of her powers." —Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth
"Cloud Six is where metaphors become real, the body falls away, and death is not. Is this a novel? Only if we all are." —Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
This information about Cloud Six was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amy Fusselman is the author of five books of nonfiction and fiction, including Idiophone (2018, Coffee House Press), which was nominated for the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize and the Believer Book Award. Her most recent book, The Means, is her first novel and was praised by People magazine as "a fast-paced and funny send-up." Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. She lives with her family in New York City.
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