Not All Dead Together

In Not All Dead Together, Lynn Stansbury weaves together past and present, gringa and Guatemalan, to dazzling effect. Her novel in stories is a fierce and poignant exploration of friendships over time, of friendships formed in the grip of history. As one character says, ""The past is always there."" I couldn't stop turning these vivid pages which took me to so many dark corners, so many shining moments. -Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven Steeped in the richness of history and culture, Not All Dead Together is a story of family relationships, the families we were born into and the families we build over time...Stansbury is adept at bringing a range of characters to life - an adolescent girl in Paris who later serves in the Peace Corps, the young Guatemalan woman who becomes her lifelong friend, a physician in Guatemala, a traumatized Mayan girl, a priest who disrupts the lives of the people he wants to help - and endows each with a distinct personality and complex humanity that make you feel for even the most flawed. No small feat. Not All Dead Together is a truly accomplished work. -Barbara Westwood Diehl, Founding and Managing Editor of The Baltimore Review Lynn Stansbury focuses on the frailties, frustrations, and precariousness of ordinary lives as they struggle to find meaning during a disorienting, dangerous, and destabilizing civil war...With this thought-provoking and bracing novel, Stansbury deftly makes evident her psychological acuity and powers of observation. Not All Dead Together deserves a wide and discerning readership. -Harvey Grossinger, author of The Quarry Like Chekhov, Lynn Stansbury writes from a tonic mind and a large heart. She explores her characters with superb psychological and emotional intensity as they struggle to survive in a world of political upheaval and violence. In prose that is at once gritty and sensuous, incisive and generous, Stansbury introduces the reader to a doctor doing surgery in crude conditions while in fear for his life, a young and bewildered Peace Corps volunteer stuck in a doomed marriage, and a vulnerable Mayan girl whose memory is temporarily lost to trauma. Stansbury...provides considerable compassionate insight into her characters' variously fraught lives. -Margaret Meyers, author of Dislocation