Tom Lynch

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to the attention he has received: a recent PBS Frontline focused on Lynch and his family business, and an even more elaborate film version about his work was produced by the BBC and had an American debut at last year's Traverse City Film Festival. Lynch himself will joke that he is "the go-to guy for death."

But none of this would have happened if Lynch did not have a particular vision, and if he had not done the work to find a strong voice to communicate that vision. First in his poetry and then in his award-winning essays, Lynch positioned himself as an intimate observer of our fragile relationship with our own mortality. More than most writers, he has watched people deal with grief and find ways to continue on in the face of it. He has seen the tentative possibilities of joy that arise even from what might seem overwhelming loss. He wrote about it stylishly, with humor and compassion. But over the years, his relationship with his subject has deepened, and he has looked into other themes--family history is one, place another--and even politics has crept into his work. And now Lynch has begun to write fiction.