Mourning Wood: A Novel

Best-selling author Daniel Paisner makes an indelible impression with a moving and funny novel. From its dramatic and humorous opening scenes to its touching conclusion, Mourning Wood hooks readers with its eccentric characters and offbeat sense of humour. Absurdity, grief, and love give the richly drawn characters depth and familiarity. When Terence Wood, a fading Hollywood icon, stages his own death and disappears into a Maine coastal town, he leaves behind a couple of ex-wives and a son – all of whom love and hate him. With a back story borrowed from one of his most forgettable pictures, Wood throws in with the louts and fishermen of Bar Harbour, Maine. He takes a job at an amusement park and falls for Two Stools, the overweight coffee shop matron who takes him in. Wood’s life soon becomes distantly, yet intimately, entwined with an unlikely mess of a man, Axel Pimletz. Pimletz gets the chance of a lifetime, however, when a publisher reads his obituary for Terence Wood and hires him to write the star’s memoirs. Desperate to make the most out of the opportunity, Pimletz takes on the trappings of Wood’s life. Eventually, Pimletz’s assumption of the fallen icon’s persona takes him to Maine, where he hopes to track down some leads for the memoir. There, Wood’s old world collides with his new one, and the resulting confusion brings ultimate clarity.