The first appearance in English of this finely wrought novel by Holmebakk, which explores the fundamental tensions between life and death that perhaps only love and hope can palliate.

How can we thrive, knowing that death is our reward? In Norwegian author Sigbjorn Holmebakk's haunting masterpiece about love and death, fear and faith, God and the loss of innocence, irreversible choices and missed opportunities, he shows how acceptance of the inevitability of death brought hope to one in doubt. Holmebakk explores this theme by describing an unusual friendship between a socialist writer and a former Lutheran minister, each confronting the death of a loved one. Central to the plot is the minister's unsettling confession in which he describes the sinister events in his childhood that led to his calling, his subsequent loss of faith, his struggles with the problem of evil, and his encounter with the Carriage Stone - the pivotal point between life and death where hope is found and lives are forever changed.