The joint winner of The Novel Prize, Anne de Marcken's It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is a sharp and funny tale for our dispossessed times.

The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known – where she loved and was loved. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest.