Mrs Death Misses Death is a book that could be enjoyed in small stages, read slowly, savoured, with the time taken to appreciate the poetry in particular.

Comparisons can easily be drawn to Max Porter’s remarkable debut Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and, closer to home, Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, and Dennis O’Driscoll’s devastating poem Someone.I’d slip an excerpt of the book into my poetry shows to see how Mrs Death landed with my poetry friends and with spoken word and book festival audiences. By the time Wolf reveals “But what if this passion and fury and all this writing were always just the ramblings of an imbalanced mind? In her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, Salena Godden breathes new life into the well-worn subject of death.

At times the book feels more like a stream of consciousness rather than a story, and there are sections written from Mrs Death’s point of view where we become swept up in her unique perspective. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Mrs Death Misses Death is an irresistible novel which speaks equally to the act of living as it does to the inevitability of dying.Mrs Death’s emphasis on women who kill is deliberate, as is the fact that she has chosen to appear in female form: “For surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it? If you come to this expecting a prose story you’ll be a little surprised with what you find here, because it’s more like a series of poems and lyrical text that comes together to tell one story, but in a way that I’ve not really seen any other books do before. They both get to look at life through the lens of death, for the future, one thing is certain- death. But in this collection, Annabelle Hirsch curates a compendium of women and their things, uncovering the thoughts and feelings at the heart of women’s daily lives, to offer an intimate and lively alternative history. As someone who went to secondary school and sixth form college in Sussex but was unable to make it to university this is such a wonderful honour.

Wolf’s quiet meandering around London, which is alive with ghosts, reflects their fragile mental state. Though inevitable, the language isn’t always there to engage with it beyond a dreaded looming darkness. She’s tired of human brutality and not just men against women; in one instance she also marks the cruelty by a mother to her child. Wolf’s London is exemplified by the image of “a one-legged pigeon picking at a discarded chicken burger by a frozen dog shit in a pissy bus stop”, and there’s also a transcript of Mrs Death’s session with a psychiatrist (picture Charon on a therapist’s couch).Young poet Wolf Willeford‘s first encounter with Death was when he was just nine, their block of flats burned down and Death took his mum.

I'm sure there will be people out there that love this and think it truly bohemian and adore it's uniqueness.Even though it’s got death in the title, it’s a book about life – it’s about living life,” says Godden.