George Mahoney suspects he is getting a little stale at redesigning refrigerators, after fourteen years in the same job. With the arrival of his new office mate, Niagara Spense, George is forced to re-evaluate everything in his life from love and family, to science itself. Obsessed by the six feet tall Niagara, the very foundations of George's belief in facts and the physical world are shaken when she reveals that she is on an incredible quest for electrical evidence of life after death—"audible fossils" she calls them. As Niagara Spense seeks the dead, and George seeks her, everything suddenly becomes possible in a novel that makes engineering funny, and mixes the world of icemakers and buttersofteners with the miraculous.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is also the author of The Bowl Is Already Broken, which The New York Times praised as “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming,” and The Frequency of Souls, which the Chicago Tribune deemed “a beguiling and wildly inventive first novel.” Honors for her work include the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award and the James Jones First Novel Award, and she has been nominated for the Orange Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a cofounder of the D.C. Women Writers Group.

Categories

• Fiction / Literary
• FIC084030

Product Details

ISBN: 9780312424855
ISBN-10: 031242485X
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: April 1st, 2005
Pages: 256
Language: English

“Beguiling and wildly inventive...A funny and wholly original love story that weds the everyday to the supernatural.” —Chicago Tribune

“Read this book! Zuravleff fashions small moments of comic wonder in this novel of family and FM frequencies, magic and flirting, metaphysics and doughnuts.” —San Diego Tribune

“Engaging...Zuravleff's insightful yet gentle rendering of the absurd [allows] readers to connect fully with her quirky and endearing characters.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Page after page, the descriptions of the novel are laugh-out- loud funny. Smart and refreshingly tender...with a stylish ebullience reminiscent of Anne Tyler.” —News & Observer (Raleigh)