When Johan was a boy, he bargained with Death, and in good time Death obligingly took his father. And when Johan was miserably married, Death kindly took his equine first wife, leaving him a tidy sum. But now, with the Reaper coming for him, Johan cries out for certainties, for control, for dignity.

He enlists his adoring second wife, the grace of his otherwise mean existence, to be, "when he couldn't fight any longer," his reluctant angel of death. But as he drifts away into melancholic, hallucinatory recollection, the bonds of their mutual devotion gradually dissolve and the living and the dying begin their inevitable divergence. And as Johan, his wife beside him, slips under the solitary shadow he fears most, we are made to witness the muted tragedy of the Scandinavian way-now more and more our own way-of dying.

Linn Ullmann has written a haunting meditation on mortality that nonetheless pulses with the aching beauty of life.