The Serpent by Neil M. Gunn

An old man living at the height of his powers of recall and memory tells the story of his life on the day of his death from the vantage point on a hill above the village where he was born.

Quietly narrated and yet raging with will and the passion of youth, this is a novel about fathers and sons, hope and hope’s death, and how we might live in the world before leaving it. In the company of such masterpieces as Seethaler’s A Whole Life and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

A wildly immersive story, The Serpent will grip the reader from the outset and is a provocative and an-putdownable study of what it is to be human.