Hospice

Hospice is the debut novel of Gregory Howard. In it, he follows Lucy, a young woman whose series of jobs opens windows into the secret lives of others and in so doing brings her back to her own secrets.

When Lucy is little something happens to her brother. He disappears for months and when he returns he’s not the same. He’s not her broth­er. At least this is what Lucy believes. But what actually happened?

Comic, melancholy, haunted, and endlessly inventive, Gregory How­ard’s debut novel Hospice follows the adult Lucy as she drifts from job to job caring for dogs, children, and older women—all the while trying to escape the questions of her past only to find herself confronting them again and again.

In the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighbourhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found.

Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.