In an age of contested values, Stanley Crawford’s wry Seed offers a sardonic exploration of the meaning of values. Curmudgeon Bill Starr’s end-of-life decisions illuminate the values that rule his life and his heirs’ and well as the material objects he and they perceive as having value.

Seed is the story of Bill Starr’s final days. Childless but with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and a nearly infinite web of extended family, Bill endeavours to empty his house completely before he dies by summon ing distant relatives to claim their inheritance. Many of his letters go unanswered, but those who do appear show up only to find that their reward is often much less valuable than they might expect.

What they get instead are Bill’s memories, made vivid by each item from the past, memories that are more exotic and curious than the lives currently lived by his young relatives.

Accompanied by his housekeeper, Ramona, and his handyman, Jonathan, Bill is a somewhat cantankerous, wildly intelligent, and often forgetful man who recalls and speaks to his passed wife, often thinking that she’s not dead. His unwillingness to recognize what has happened to her and to give away his only possession of any value, a 1937 Pierce-Arrow automobile that they bought together, becomes the measure of his grief and of his love in this profoundly funny novel that faces death and love sincerely.