Evacuation Plan: A Novel from the Hospice

Welcome to the world of hospice where no one talks about the weather or other trivialities. Enter Matt, a fledgling screenwriter who volunteers to work with the terminally ill in exchange for a good plot for his next script. He meets the people who work, die and mourn in this world of last moments. In the novel-in-stories style of Tim O'Brien's [i]July July[/i], O'Connell's characters in [i]Evacuation Plan[/i] reveal themselves in poignantly unfolding stories: the gambler who played a risky game involving his wife and his ex-con father, the mortician who was an unwed father-to-be, the daughter whose dying father had no clue about the night her world spun out of control, the nurse who lived among aging neighbors and struggled to hold her own family in place, the drunk who magically encountered himself as a boy. Forgiveness, joy, making the final leap: [i]Evacuation Plan[/i] is the story of a world in which the clock ticks off the final moments for all of us and makes those moments a lifetime.