The quick and the dead
By: Joy Williams.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: A. Knopf
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 307
Subjects: Teenage girls -- Fiction; Maternal deprivation -- Fiction; Female friendship -- Fiction; Suburban life -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction; Phoenix (Ariz.) -- Fiction; Arizona -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: "Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents - from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wild-life museum - accompanied by restless, confounded adults.

A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old - the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless.

With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent."--BOOK JACKET.