Title: The 23rd dream
Description: In a life-affirming treatment of a melancholy subject, The 23rd Dream gently draws the reader in to walk the valley of the shadow of death with Adam Stauffer and his family. Adam and Marian Stauffer and their three children are an ordinary middle-class family until Adam is diagnosed with a fatal disease. This moving first novel charts the progress of Adam's illness as well as his own and his family's response to it. Told in a deceptively transparent style, the book.

Details the family's year-long ordeal, moving from Chicago, where the narrative opens, to South Texas, where Adam grew up and where he chooses to return to die. The reader follows Adam's fear, frustration, and final acceptance of his fate through his journal and through the filter of Marian's consciousness as she struggles to maintain a semblance of normalcy in the family's day-to-day existence. Family love and the minutiae of everyday life - dachshunds' toenails.

Scratching on hardwood floors, siblings jockeying for position in the car, the heartening aroma of bacon cooking - provide the particularity that grounds the larger themes of loss, suffering, and reconciliation. This poignant novel portrays the hopes and fears of living, the incandescent mysteries of dying, and the grace that hovers just above both.
Subjects: Fiction, Terminally ill, Families
Places: Texas