Great read, you become wrapped up in this story and keep turning the pages. A wonderful story about friendship and what we fear most yet are fascinated by.

Troubled writer, Wolf, first meets Mrs Death on the day Wolf’s mother dies in a Grenfell Tower-style fire. As an adult, Wolf becomes her scribe as Mrs Death tells her story.

As you can surmise from the title, Mrs Death Misses Death plays with words and riffs on the vocabulary of dying—you can definitely tell that the author is a poet. A playful and life-affirming as well as incredibly poignant story.

I have long been a fan of Selena Godden, I love her poetry so wasn't surprised by the poetic prose of her writing, the rhythm and tone made is a true pleasure to read.
I thought the relationship of Wolfe and Mrs Death was a unique and interesting way to investigate death and loss, without becoming too heaving.
For me a thought provoking book that I will definitely revisit again.

Fuck me. I'm not going to go into details but death is a topic I have thought about a lot this year, for a number of reasons. The latest of which is discovering the term anticipatory grief and having the weight of that press down with unrelenting power. And so what better time to... read a book that makes the topic of death unavoidable??

A big swing, personally, it was high risk. Basically: Mrs Death tells her story. In doing so, across poetry and prose, offloading her tales onto young writer Wolf, it becomes a time leaping reflection of loss and life and hope through the deaths and near misses of many throughout.

Have I seen a lot of the ideas in this book on how you need death to truly appreciate life before? Yes. Have I seen it packaged in such an enjoyable way? No. Have I picked possibly the most fucked up time emotionally to take on a book like this? Also probably yes, but I feel like I needed a punch to remind me of the good and memory that counters the loss. And what a lyrical punch it was.

This is just wonderful, lyrical, life-affirming and timely. Combining a number of literary forms including traditional storytelling and poetry, it tells a story of Mrs Death’s loneliness and weariness. She seeks to unburden herself, to tell someone what she has lived through and experienced. Wolf Willeford is also lonely, a twentysomething Londoner brought up by his grandparents after his mother died in a tower block fire. A struggling writer, one day he buys an antique desk with his rent money and feels compelled to write Mrs Death’s memoirs. She has passed through time unnoticed, after all everyone thinks Death is male and nobody really notices an older Black woman, she is practically invisible and yet she has seen so much.

Mrs Death Misses Death deals with some heavy issues: mental health, murder, historical oppression and discrimination. It is also a social commentary of our own time, our disastrous environmental impact on the planet, Grenfell fire, racism. Yet it is also about life, compassion, love and joy and it is hopeful. I enjoyed it very much, it is original, thought-provoking and beautifully written. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Canongate and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review Mrs Death Misses Death.

It might not be considered the best time to either publish or read a new novel about death in a global pandemic. We have all faced a strange year where expectations of what we can or should do have changed, where “normal” is not really the same. But when you encounter poet Godden’s wry tale where she challenges what are culturally regarded as normal as well, you know you will be in for an interesting read.
First you must understand that death is not male as you may have been told many times in many places. Death, like life, is undoubtedly female. And Wolf Willeford is going to make this clear to you by publishing the “edited Memoirs of Mrs Death”. One might like to think that this would an ambitious project at best, an unlikely achievement at worst because Wolf can surely only live one truncated life, but Death is eternal and will have travelled through so many centuries, seen and experienced so much, that his capacity to describe even a fraction of it with perspective is surely open to serious doubt. Even if he did have the capacity to edit a passably full or truthful account of said memoirs anyway.
Mrs Death will visit Wolf and dispute what he is writing and ask awkward questions and challenge his answers – he will question her as to her beliefs and it becomes clear she thinks on an entirely different philosophical plane to anything he can contemplate. She will talk to him of the benefits of aging and death itself which is always there and which is perceived in different contradictory ways, often just a fleeting moment on the edge of time. Time and place are probably not static and can vary in front of you; the usual can therefore prove to be something else – especially if you open your eyes. Mrs Death is the person to speak of this, if she chooses, because she has been to so many places and has lived so long.
All a reviewer can say is read this vibrant and challenging novel as it will speak to readers in different ways according to their own experience of death – and of course living. Which is of course the fundamental way of Mrs Death’s life whatever she – or indeed Wolf who can prove an unrealistic editor of anyone’s life – may believe or tell you. Among this literary flurry of words, ideas, time and places, beliefs and non beliefs you will have to select for yourself what is really there and what is likely, what false and of course what is worth believing. This is an extraordinary read, one to immerse yourself in – and not just in times of “international crisis”. Death is a certainty, but so is life. Enjoy

'Mrs Death Misses Death' is a darkly strange little book that is very hard to define. A young man called Wolf befriends, if it can be called that, Death, who happens to be a very tired, very opinionated black woman.
"Some people never imagine death. They rush and push and elbow through life, they use people like stepping stones or the rungs of a ladder. They use people and take what they need and move on, they consume and consume, constantly taking, reaching and grabbing. Where the f**k do they think they are hurrying to? Where do they think this road goes? I am Mrs Death and I am coming for you all."
Mrs Death communicates with Wolf after he acquires a beautiful old desk, which Mrs Death uses as a conduit. He writes down what Mrs Death tells him, all her thoughts and worries and annoyances. But Mrs Death had 'met' Wolf many years before, when he was nine and his mother was killed in a fire. Wolf somehow survived, and ever since he has been searching for meaning and belonging. The story weaves backwards and forwards in time, a visceral, at times darkly humorous stream of consciousness. Poetic, lyrical, full of passion and heartbreak and joy, it's a story that will stay with me for a long time.

I devoured this original book in 2 sittings as it is fairly short and a very easy read but packs a punch of heartbreak and revelations that keep you reading.
Wolf is a complicated character; engulfed by grief, struggling with his mental health and yet trying to secure his dream of becoming a writer, he develops an unusual friendship with Mrs Death. This takes us on a journey exploring the lives and deaths of generations of both Wolf's ancestry and infamous deaths in the past. Because Mrs Death is THE Death, the personification of all that has witnessed every life ending, but also those spared.
I was grateful for the poignant, true-story deaths Godden writes about with such compassion: miscarriages of justice, cruel exploitation, senseless murders and preventable tragedies that need to be remembered. However, don't be fooled in to thinking this book is all doom and gloom, it has a darkness no doubt of that, but the poetry and ultimate plan of the story is the most life-affirming, hopeful thing I've read in a long time.
Particularly in the Western world humans have a very difficult relationship with death, however this book offers a bridge, a humanising approach to the connection between life and death, our psyche of grief and how fragile but precious EVERY life can be.

I really liked the idea of this book. I felt that it got a bit repetitive. Some of it was thought provoking and memorable. I think that I would have preferred fictional characters instead of victims of recent murders.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Unfortunately I was DNF after a few chapters. It just didn't grab my attention, which was a shame as the premise was sound. I'll try again another day.

Thanks Canongate for the eARC of this title!

I requested this title because my first thought on seeing the title was "WOW what a fascinating title"! After reading that title I decided I needed it ASAP. My second thought, before reading the blurb was, Mrs Death misses death? She misses Mr/Mrs/Mx Death? Where have they gone? But then I was like, oh maybe she misses death, doesn't always quite get people the first time round... I wasn't sure at all to be quite honest.

So my thoughts so far, are that its a great book, but not an easy book? Its about death and death and Wolf are both interesting characters but I don't love them 🙈

Its a slow going book, my favourite bit so far is a story about Jack the Ripper, a book about Death and her adventures and it only feels like its picking up almost 50% of the way through..

Okay, back two days later after finishing this book and I think I get it a bit more. Death is personified as a working class black woman and Wolf our main character is a biracial individual who has seen his fair share of death, the aftermath of death has been, not a constant per se, but a presence on multiple occasions in his life.

This is a good book, no doubt about it. But I don't know if I quite got it to begin with. I was a little confused, considering the subject matter I should not have expected this to be a super easy read. But I guess I was, I was kind of waiting to read about Mrs Death's adventures in death the interesting deaths she's facilitated, the adventures she has had.

This was not that.

This is a book about Wolf Willeford, a struggling writer, and his relationship with death, its been a constant and a focus in his life. And after an intense bender (which totally sounds like it could have killed him) Wolf sees a beautiful antique desk in an antiques shop and buys it. When it gets delivered Wolf starts talking to Mrs Death who talks back.

Mrs Death tells Wolf of all the things she's seen in her existence, the way humans have evolved, her relationship with Life, the love she's had and the deaths she's facilitated.

It was a really great read but I wasn't super satisfied with it. I think if I had known the author was a poet beforehand I would have known what to expect!

I liked the writing style and the format of the author penning their own personal history with Mrs Death. I enjoyed the premise and found it very insightful.

I utterly adored this. A lyrical exploration or grief through poetry and prose. Rather than being a traditional narrative story, this read like experiencing raw emotion, and tells the tale of the traumatised Wolf who is coming to terms with their incredible losses while channeling Mrs Death.
This is elegant and raw and life-affirming, although their are very powerful moments of suicide ideolation.
This is truly a book born from the sociological, environmental, economical and political trauma currently being experienced globally with heavy influences of Grenfell, and Rasict tragedies from recent years. It addresses anxiety and trauma but provides a route map through it. And it is endlessly quotable. If this doesn't get nominated for all the prizes and win at least half of them I will be shocked.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Wolf, a young, struggling writer and already familiar with grief, grows acquainted with Mrs Death. Through their shared desk, the two share their stories of love, loss and pain.

This is abstract and esoteric, and because of this will be off-putting to some. But it is also lyrical and poignant. It's very compelling and I read it very quickly (the disclaimer didn't lie about being able to read it on a train from London to Liverpool!) - once I started reading there was no stopping until it was finished. The overall talk of death and grief is quite existentially heavy and anxiety-inducing, particularly in it's descriptions of a Grenfell like incident, though Godden focusing on one individual and their grief is written very well.
It also drew me to reading up more on injustices I had never heard about (such as Sarah Reed and Inga Maria Hauser). This book focused on violence against the female body, particularly against black women and how overlooked they are in society. Again, it is a weighty topic but an important one and Godden did a great job of depicting.
Mrs Death Misses Death is an odd and unique read, filled with incredibly imaginative writing. I don't know if it's a book I enjoyed, but it is one I savoured and am sure I will be thinking about for a long time.

*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

How could I resist picking up a book with this cover and title during the spookiest month of the year? I went in knowing very little and was pleasantly surprised.

The most surprising thing about the book, and the aspect I loved most, is the mix of prose, poetry, dialogue transcripts and diary entries, along with a mix of philosophical tangents that feel almost like non-fiction, as well as actual historical occurrences, alongside the stories of Wolf and Mrs Death. Salena Godden managed to keep me hooked throughout with her stream of consciousness writing style without making the book inaccessible.

If you are open to fiction that has some speculative elements and isn’t neatly tied up in a bow, I would highly recommend this book. I didn’t personally like the abrupt ending but I loved the journey getting there. There are some graphic scenes, both in terms of sexual content and with deadly graphic violence, which were shocking but contrasted with the dreamlike state of the rest of the novel.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and I would highly recommend you pick it up when it releases early 2021. A great autumn read for those who don’t want to read intense horror but still experience a dark and gothic atmosphere.

4 out of 5 stars!

I can't decide if I am not intelligent enough to appreciate this book or, I am intelligent enough to see it as pretentious ramblings. Definitely not the book for me. I should have heeded the warning in the book not to waste time and stopped reading after a couple of chapters. However, I'm sure a lot of readers will enjoy this unusual book.

Mrs Death misses death is a different kind of novel. It merges prose and poetry to tell the story of Death and a writer Wolf. The personification of death as a woman was interesting as a concept. Here Death is a black woman taking different forms/jobs and is seldom noticed by others. She tells her story—kind of like a memoir—to Wolf. Within the pages we visit deaths of past (as old as 1700s), present, deaths that hover between life and death. The whole book tells stories + conversations. We get to know Death and Wolf and the deaths in their lives. Some are better written than the others. There's the story of a woman who makes a young girl undress and asks men to pay a tuppence to have a peek. Soon the business flourishes and there are holes all over the walls and a higher priced hole over the roof where men can peek at her. Later she is asked to offer more to keep the men coming, maybe paint a nipple red. This was such an intriguing story and I enjoyed it.

While the concept is certainly interesting, I wish it was specifically mentioned in the blurb that the book is a mix of prose and poetry. I was not expecting it (I almost thought if there was something wrong in the formatting). I found my interest sinusoidal—at times I was heavily invested in the particular story but read another one half heartedly. The book explores race and gender but at some portions, they don't work well—i don't know why whether due to the experimental structure or because we are suspended between Wolf's own story and Death's past.. That said, I am looking forward to see what Godden writes next. She has certainly got an imagination.

Mrs Death is exhausted. She thought the twenty-first century would be easier, a lighter workload, but people are still dying above and beyond what is necessary; genocide, natural disasters, sometimes an accident when taking a selfie. And that’s just the human race. She also has things like the plastic-filled oceans, forest fires and climate change to deal with. Befriending a young poet named Wolf Willeford, Mrs Death and Wolf join forces to tell her story.

‘Mrs Death Misses Death’ is a powerful novel. The fact that the author, Salena Godden, is a poet is so clearly apparent from the way it is written and this use of words and phrases makes the story even more affecting. It is extremely quotable and I have had to restrain myself from sharing all the wonderful, thought-provoking lines within its pages. I’m sure they will be seen on Pinterest walls and Tumblr feeds in due course!

Yet, for a book about death, there is a lot of emphasis on living and there are plenty of moments which raise a smile and sometimes a chuckle. It gives us a lot to think about, too. Recurring themes throughout the novel include those of our personal histories, the realities of mental health, the portrayal and perceived roles of women, and of identity.

Although we get an impression of how Mrs Death likes to present herself fairly early – whether as a ‘poor old... homeless black beggar-woman’ or sometimes with a look inspired by Nina Simone – we don’t get many descriptions of Wolf throughout the book until near the end. For much of the book, they remain a character that we can’t easily visualise – or indeed ‘label’ – and I really liked this.

I found I needed to read this book twice, the second time in one sitting, to really get the most from the text. In doing so, I realised that this was no hardship; as I have said, the novel is beautifully written, plus the ‘disclaimer’ that begins the book suggests it can be read in the time it takes a train to travel between London and Liverpool. ‘This book is short because life is short’, it tells us. So, make sure you find the time to enjoy this incredible book; it’s later than you think.

My thanks to NetGalley UK and to the publisher, Canongate, for the advance copy of this book, on which this review is based.

This is a moving and thought-provoking story about Mrs Death. She has spent eternity doing her job and she is fed up and now wants to find someone and unburden herself what with all the things she has done. So, she meets a young writer called Wolf. Who has some experience in death as she nearly died in a fire and half her family is dead? Mrs Death shows Wolf everything about death and what could have been done differently and how people lived years ago and about life. How to live life to the fullest. The story is not written in a normal sense. This story is part narrative, part poetry.
Thank you NetGalley and Canongate for a copy of Mrs Death misses death by Salena Godden. When I requested this, I was expecting something completely different to what I just read in a good way.
This is an unusual, but beautifully written story about death but also life. It is fast paced and an easy read. I couldn’t put this down. This is one of them books that will leave you with unanswered questions that will stay in your mind for a long time. It also a great start for a debut novel. 4 stars from me.

Ok, I’ll be honest I was exactly sure what to make of Mrs Death Misses Death, that wasn’t to say it wasn’t good because it was, it just required the reader to think out of the box and concentrate.
The structure was interesting, part narrative and part poetry, not surprising as the author is also a poet. It did take some getting used to but I felt it worked well and broke up the narrative, which was quite heavy reading at times.
The other factor was the interaction between Wolfie and Mrs Death herself. You wondered if Wolfie obviously had a chequered past, the loss of his mother in a fire, an absent father, and brought up by a grandfather who clearly didn’t want the responsibility.
I wasn’t sure if Wolfie was contemplating ending his own life, as he struggled with depression, and loneliness, his solace found in a second hand writing desk and his conversations with Mrs Death.
Mrs Death herself was an interesting concept, as were her own opinions and views. She challenged us on our perception that death was always considered male, the grim reaper the obvious image. Where did this thought come from, why do we have these perceptions?
She took us through time, to famous deaths, to murder, to those of us that hover between life and death, narrowly miss death, rising to fight another day.
You soon came to realise that Wolfie was her conduit, as he wrote down her stream of consciousness, as he examined his own journey through life, one that you found difficult to see a future.
This was a novel that examined many things, race, gender and many other themes. It was very different, but also very good, but a niche read that some many readers may struggle to get to grips with.
I definitely enjoyed it.