Lividian Publications is proud to be publishing a deluxe signed, numbered, and slipcased Limited Edition hardcover of A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan.

This special edition has been lavishly crafted with collectors and readers alike in mind. François Vaillancourt provided stunning color artwork for the dust jacket and frontispiece, plus ten black and white illustrations for the interior, making this a true work of art. As a special bonus, “Good Man Mad” by Patrick McGrath is included as an afterword.

About the Novel:
Dark, poetic, and chilling, A Prayer for the Dying asks if it’s possible to be a good man in a time of madness.

Set in leafy Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying opens harmlessly on a languid summer day; only slowly do events reveal themselves as sinister, bloom gently into a shared nightmare, as one neighbor after another succumbs to a creeping, always fatal disease. Our sole witness to this epidemic is Jacob Hansen, Friendship’s sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, a man with a large heart and conscience.

As the disease engulfs his town, breeding hysteria, Jacob must find a humane way to save those he loves, short of calling up a full quarantine and boarding up the sick in their houses. And what of the tramps slipping nightly through the tinder dry woods, and the spiritualists on the edge of town with their charismatic leaders, Chase. Who will bury the dead properly, if not Jacob?

A Prayer for the Dying is a rare and scary book, Stewart O’Nan’s most astounding achievement yet, a sunlit Gothic painted in shimmering prose that darkens and disturbs your complacency the further you go into it until – as in the best Poe and Flannery O’Connor – there is no going back.