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From the acclaimed prize-winning author of Snap, Licorice, and Are You Mine? comes an awe-inspiring novel about the power of will in the face of life's sometimes tragic surprises.

When Isobel Albright finds a tiny, sharp pebble of a lump in her breast, she realizes that her too reasonable, too predictable, too solitary life will be forever changed. From that moment on, the natural order of things will undergo an irrevocable and startling transformation, opening a door to Isobel's rightful future -- and to people and places unknown.

Abby Frucht writes about people for whom natural law doesn't always come naturally, and whose eccentricities hijack our hearts. Avoiding maudlin sentimentality and depression, she allows her characters to triumph through the sheer strength of their wills.

Isobel Albright is not the type of person to panic. "I was too sedentary. Around me, time and space made tracks but even they were only spiral, concentric, overlapping as the seasons." On the other hand, she's just found a lump (though it feels too sharp for that term) on her breast; her chief curator job has gone up in smoke--or at least the Fox Valley Historical Museum has; and she's sharing a bed with her best friend's son. Mortal illness is not the sort of adventure Isobel has been craving, and yet Abby Frucht movingly turns her fate into an experience of wonder and grief. Life Before Death cuts between 1995 and 1996 and various points in the future, up to 2010. In the present, Isobel is dying; when time extends, she is in remission and her life is filled with friendship, children, a husband. "I missed him as fiercely as if I knew who he was." Frucht grounds her heroine's supple, searching imagination in a heart-stopping reality.