I had mixed feelings about this one, especially as my expectations were quite high. The writing style was beautiful, but at times it tipped over from profound into just pretentious and overly repetitive. I loved the two main characters and became really attached to both over the course of the book - but I was left wanting a bit more. In particular, I think it would have really benefitted from a tighter plot and more actual events taking place. It also didn't have as much emotional impact as it could have, maybe related to the plot issues. All that said, I did enjoy it and I'm interested to see what Godden writes next.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Atmopsheric, immersive, moody - this was a fantastic release that hit every note i could ask for. The writing was mesmerising, i highly recommend!

Opening with the disclaimer, 'Spoiler alert: We will all die in the end', poet Salena Godden's debut novel packs quite the punch. It fascinated me how she noted in the early pages that 'any book with the word Death in the title must be light enough to carry in your hand luggage'. Reflecting back, I think of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and The Language of Dying - both books burned into my brain - and remember that they too sit slight on my shelf. Death is a topic that we cannot bear to sit down beside for too long. We can hardly bear to look at it. Indeed, we walk past with our eyes averted. And so Godden explains that 'the greatest trick man played was making you believe I was a man'. In this book, Death is not the Grim Reaper in a black hood with a scythe. Instead, she appears as a series of black women, whether homeless beggar, kindly black lady or shimmering Nina Simone figure, but all because 'there is no human more invisible, more easily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past' than a black woman. Shape-shifting across history through the unseen and the unsung, Mrs Death is finally ready to tell her story.

Chosen to be Mrs Death's scribe is Wolf Willeford who escaped an early encounter in a tower block fire which caused their mother's death. Sometimes Mrs Death misses. Told in a stream of consciousness, Mrs Death looks back on the various deaths within history while also reflecting on the current climate which makes being Death even more stressful than ever before. One minute she looks back on Jack the Ripper (a woman according to Mrs Death) or the tragic death of Inga Maria Hauser in the forest at Ballypatrick, then there are references to the war in Syria, the fire at Grenfell Tower right up to the COVID-19 pandemic where she scolds us for celebrating the wrong heroes, 'Your heroes are working overtime in the crumbling NHS A&E departments [...] Our heroes are your doctors and nurses, your teachers and volunteers, people taking phone calls at the Samaritans and talking people down from the edge'.

The mythology nerd was fascinated by the creation myth going on in the background to Mrs Death's monologues, where Life and Death are sisters and Time is Death's lover. But what I loved most about Mrs Death was how she lives up to the dedication on the frontispiece, 'Mourn the death but fight like hell for the living'. For every awful passage about injustice, Mrs Death also exhorts us to take enthusiastic hold of our lives. 'Take today and blow its mind; take this today and suck it dry. Take today and fill it with the best of you.' These words have reverberated through me in the few weeks since I have read them. As Mrs Death points out, we none of us know when our expiry dates are incoming. If we did, we would likely plan differently.

Mrs Death also considers how we do our mourning. That strange phrase 'good innings'. What does it even mean? The way in which people outpour their grief on social media and for what? What does posting 'RIP on social media' accomplish? How have we become so detached and euphemistic about the sufferings of others? On the one hand, this is a kaleidoscope of morbid musings - Mrs Death's desk is her link to Wolf but the desk would have preferred to be a piano - but on the other, Godden captures so many of our modern anxieties. We have to function in this strange world which hides behind a screen and denies us the truth - chlorinated chicken will not be so bad, there is nothing tragic about the escalating use of food banks, pretend you cannot see the homeless person - and yet we should all be crying on buses about the devastation of it all.

Mrs Death is a book to experience, a headrest of emotion and feeling. Despite its dark subject matter, this is an exhilarating read. Mrs Death whirls us around in her own danse macabre and then sets us down, out of breath. Even at the close, she leaves us with much to think about. Godden's parting words exhort us to remember, 'write the name that came to mind as you read this story …. Please add your loved one's name on one of these blank pages, maybe add a date, a memory or a prayer. In this one act of remembrance we will be united. From now on every single person who reads this book will know their copy contains their own dead. As time passes, if this book is borrowed or passed along, the names will live on …… One day they may read your own name. One day they may read mine. In this we are connected. We share these names of our loved ones in the whisper of the last page turning, over the years to come.' Musical, memory and each fragment unforgettable, Mrs Death Misses Death takes up a dirge and somehow sets its beat to a battle song.

You know those books that you know are good but you just don't like them? This was that for me. It has a really intriguing premise and the writing is poetic and interesting but I just couldn't connect with it.

Review not posted anywhere else.

Salena Godden has created a metaphysical challenge for readers of her book, #MrsDeathMissesDeath and I fear I may not be up to the challenge of unpicking the threads. First, her vision of death is bleak. Mrs Death comes for you, the end. To each their own when it comes to the afterlife but I like to think, like Tolkien has Gandalf summarise that our spark of energy, our being, passes through fire and shadow and emerges into nothingness, forgotten by ourselves and by those left behind. I also don't spend time thinking on death because you cannot fight the inevitable.

"Your ancestors survived so much, so you could survive so much...Look at yourself and recognise that you are here and now because they were there and then."

This book isn't a novel, it's prose and poetry and for those who know me, I avoid this kind of work. I find poetry intensely irritating. It's for this reason Mrs Death is rated 3/5 instead of 5/5. It's also a 3 because.at no point do we, as readers, finding ourselves offered the chance to really know Wolf or Mrs Death. They exist as snapshots in an unexplained and half formed album. If this work were a true, literary novel, it is mind blowing where it could have gone. I'm actually imagining this in the hands of Hanya Yanagihara & feeling angry it isn't hers.

Ultimately, what could have been brilliant is only mediocre.

Thank you to NetGalley and Publishers for this ARC

Godden pens an original in both concept and style. Easy read that is painful beautiful and utterly brilliant

Incredible; shattered my expectations with the innovative take on form and genre. A true talent, and an unforgettable voice.

A deeply imaginative book where a damaged young writer, Wolf, is in conversation with Mrs Death with a view to writing her memoir. Mrs Death is struggling and needs to unburden herself but Wolf, familiar with her from an early loss, is struggling too. The narrative shifts into different styles and always there remains the question of how real Mrs Death is as Wolf questions his sanity. This is a moving and inspired tale.

This book is incredibly original in both content and style, defying genre categorisation (although, hopefully, not description!).

Written partly in poetry and partly in a breathless, desperate, stream-of-consciousness prose, which carries you with the flow, deeper and deeper into the world of death, this world of death and the life in death.

The book tells the story of writer Wolf and his subject and muse, Mrs Death, and numerous other stories along the way, all featuring death in one of its many forms. Expect to see every kind of death, from world events to newsworthy murders, to endless personal, private stories. Expect to find illness and injury, murder and mishap, war wounds and peaceful passings – everywhere death happens, there is Mrs Death and her faithful chronicler.

It is left open to the reader to decide whether this is a fantasy-esque novel, in which death is personified in an elderly black woman who can visit someone in person to tell her stories, or whether Wolf is suffering from undiagnosed (or maybe diagnosed but undisclosed) mental health issues and is vividly hallucinating the conversations he records. Or maybe both are true, simultaneously?

Regardless, this is a beautifully written stroll through the life of death, her womanhood, her varied experiences and her sorrows. And while the content may seem morbid to some, it is also somehow reassuring. I rather like the idea of death personified… the personal touch as you head into the biggest unknown of all.

This is a novel about life, death, how we deal with those around us and our own loneliness. It’s part prose, part poetry and all stream of consciousness, which I enjoyed. Learning a bit more about Salena Godden, I realise that it’s likely to do with her roots in poetry.

Wolf is the conduit through which Mrs Death tells her story from the beginning of time. She is everyone, everywhere - the Black woman in rags in the doorway, on the bus, under the bridge. She talks to Wolf via a desk, which in turn remembers being a tree and in the forest. This sounds quite far fetched, I know, but it works - somehow encouraging thoughts on our connection with the world.

As well as being a narrative concerned with women, and being Black, it also covers climate change and the destruction we are wreaking/have already wreaked on the planet we live in. Again, although this sounds like heavy going I found it to be interesting, looking at emotive and important subjects through the detached Mrs Death, who is herself finding a deeper emotional attachment than she had expected to have.

Whole essays could be written on the symbolism - Wolf as the main character, rabbits as a recurring emblem, signifying Death herself. Or not. Death talks of her counterpart, Life, and the inextricable interconnection there too.

Wolf, in our recognisable world, lives a solitary life pinging from one squat to another. They couch it as freedom, independence but really, their story is also of grief and loss. Their mother gone in the Grenfell disaster and being sent to their harsh grandparents.

Thoughtful, thought provoking and a novel I can see myself reading again and again. There was something about Death which reminded me of Addie LaRue <link> but I think that’s more thematic commonality than style. I would say that the title makes it difficult to tell people what you’re reading, although I appreciate the wordplay!

Thanks to Netgalley and Canongate for the DRC.

I would like to extend my gratitude to the author, publisher and NetGalley for sending this advanced reader's copy in return for a fair and honest review.

I was recommended this book by one of my fellow bookworms who loved it, sadly, I didn’t. The way it was written made me feel stupid at times as I didn’t quite understand it. The mix of text and poetry went over my head. I liked how Death is described as many different things. I enjoyed feeling like Death was actually a character in the book but that was about it.

A beautifully written, imaginative novel of both prose and poetry. Death comes in many forms and effects everyone on the planet. Not an easy read but a memorable one. .

I got really confused with this one!! I think if you are into more literary fiction you will love this but for me it just went right over my head!

It's taken me too long to get around to reviewing this stunning book, which is a poetic and heart-felt work of art. Utterly brilliant and wonderfully unique, there is, and will be again, nothing quite like this book.

It was both easy to read and terribly painful at times, and when I finished it, again, I felt both like a burden had been lifted and put on at the same time. It's a clever book in so many ways, and is an asset to the literary world.

In Godden's book Death is someone who, for the whole of time, has basically facilitated humanity's transition from life into death. These deaths are often sudden and unexpected so Death needs to be unobtrusive, unthreatening and someone who could be found just about anywhere - which certainly rules out the skeletal figure with robes and a scythe. Here Death is Mrs Death, a Black woman who, while she does shift her appearance, always seems to look like the kind of working-class woman who is sweeping, cleaning, or waiting somewhere in the background. We meet her through a young writer, Wolf Willeford, who has had brushes with Mrs Death's work over the years - they survived a fire which is, at the very least, based on the Grenfell fire and they are obviously troubled - their experiences almost guarantee this. The purchase of a beautiful, if expensive, desk leads to Wolf writing Mrs Death's memoirs, looking at the individual and more everyday deaths she has been present at as well as grimmer ones - murders, deaths in police custody, high profile serial killers, violence. Mrs Death is tired - listening to the final words, stories and regrets of countless people is physically and mentally exhausting - yet her conversations with Wolf help them to recall the reasons why life is worth living.

This book is often quite bleak - many of the dead are kind, loving people killed brutally - and frequently told in blunt and offensive language but is oddly uplifting. Maybe it is Wolf's example - that someone with so much pain, loss and hardship in their life can express themselves so eloquently and find so much hope in the future is a powerful message. Wolf is a character who has suffered so much loss and copes with being bipolar (the impulsive desk purchase with money that should have been rent is classic....) yet exhibits so much life and energy. The author, Godden, is a poet and it shows in the way language is used - even a stream of C-words has a kind of angry music to it - so, as often happens, it is art which helps us to cope with both death and the fear of death.

This is a strange but delightful little read.

Some parts are beautiful, relevant and interesting. Some are long, slow and written in a totally different style.

It was a slow read for me, would pick it up, read a chapter, then put it down. But I still enjoyed it.

This is a beautiful book, and it surprised me how much I enjoyed the mixture of prose and poetry - I tend to skip poems when they come up in books but these were readable and were an integral part of the experience. The premise is a personified Death, talking to a writer after they have bought an antique desk - there are short chapters about different people dying, or nearly dying, all beautifully described. I found it a little intense and melancholic, which probably reflects the circumstances in which I was reading it. It can obviously bring up sad feelings and anxieties, so it might not be a great book for everyone. If you can, read it in one go- I had to take a couple of breaks and it made it much harder to get back into the unique voice of the story.

This hugely original story about Mrs Death was told with great imagination, and heart. Salena Godden is a poet, and it showed through the beauty and lyricism of the language. There is sadness, but it is so moving and powerful, I finished with a feeling of extreme life affirming happiness. A fab read.

I didn't connect with this book's style - i apprecaited it, but didn't feel drawn to it, and didn't get further than a few chapters. Not one for me.