It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

Joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize
Winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

Special offer: 2022 Novel Prize winners bundle

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over asks how much of yourself can you lose before you are lost…and then what happens?

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

WINNER: The Novel Prize 2022
WINNER: Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: Pacific Northwest Book Award 2025

A work of quietly detonative imagination. Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate… Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human.
Judges’ comments, Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.
Alexandra Kleeman

Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then – with prose as elegant as it is spooked – tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut.
Sabrina Orah Mark

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended.
Jeff VanderMeer

A soul-stirringly expansive novel…darkly comic and metaphysical.
Kate Simpson, The Telegraph (5-star review)

An unsettling narrative of grief and zombies… [that] amounts to a sharp and weighty depiction of what does and doesn’t make someone human.
Publishers Weekly

A superb and feral work, moving without hesitation through grief, through dust, and therefore through time.
Giada Scodellaro

Exceptional… de Marcken’s sparse and exquisitely crafted prose is intentionally enigmatic but deeply resonant.
Pilgrim Hodgson, Readings

It’s hard to imagine a more erudite zombie story.This is de Marcken’s central trope – and her triumph. She seizes the gut-smeared cliches of The Walking Dead and recomposes them as a philosophical odyssey.
John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail

The prose is exquisite and the form is inventive…wry and moving and very beautiful.
Susie Mesure, The Spectator

A gorgeous, masterful meditation on the passage of time, the enduring power of memory and the fundamental questions of human existence.
Elaine Chennatt, Aniko Press