Loving the Dead and Gone

By: Judith Turner-Yamamoto

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, Sophie Amoss, Roger Clark, Cassandra Campbell, full cast

"This beautifully written novel, with its complicated, stubborn characters, will haunt you long after the last page.”—Margot Livesey, Author of The Boy in the Field

The death of Donald Ray in a freak car accident becomes the catalyst for the release of passions, needs, and hurts. Clayton’s discovery of dead Donald Ray upends his longtime emotional numbness. Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, struggles to reconnect with her late husband while proving herself still alive. Soon Clayton and Darlene’s bond of loss and death works its magic, drawing them into an affair that brings the loneliness in Clayton’s marriage to a crisis. When Aurilla Cutter, Clayton’s mother-in-law, learns about the affair, her own memories of longing and infidelity are set loose. Like Darlene’s passions—unappeased and clung to—Aurilla’s possess an intensity that denies life to the present. As Aurilla’s own forbidden and tragic story of love, death, and repeated loss alternates with Darlene’s and Clayton’s, the divide of generations narrows and collapses, building to the unlikely collision.

©2022 Judith Turner-Yamamoto (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Choral Voices Illuminate a Luminous Novel

I read this book first and loved it so much I decided to listen to the audiobook. I was not disappointed. The performers do an incredible job of bringing this lyrical interior novel to life. The four actors voices take us in the minds and hearts of four people whose lives are upturned by a tragic loss in rural North Carolina in the 1960s.

The main themes of love, loss, grief, and grace are beautifully rendered in an expressive novel that also eloquently explores the complicated love-hate relationships between mothers and daughters, and of loveless, cold marriages held together only by responsibility and commitment.

This is literary fiction at its finest in its incisive exploration of emotions and universal truths in the guise of telling the story of two very different women.

'Everywhere she looked she saw their marriage. So big, like the ocean it went on and on, touching everything.' --this line alone, delivered by Where the Crawdads Sing narrator Cassandra Campbell, is worth the listen.

Could've been great but was just so-so for me

The narrators all did a fine job but I didn't feel like they were the right voices for the characters. I thought the story grabbed me right away and started strong, it just kind of faltered from there.