Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

Okay, so the book, do you have an elevator pitch for the book?

Kind of.

I, I like to say that it's a book about life narrated by Death.

Death is just a normal guy called Travis, who he lives in a kind of gray rundown town, and his job is to comfort people in their last few moments of life.

So he will sit with them.

He'll listen to their stories.

He'll never, ever judge or try and change anything.

He's just there at the end to see you out to whatever follows next.

And so naturally, because it's about death, there's a lot of sadness in it.

But hopefully, I, I'd really like to try and bring out the richness and beauty of life as well without being preachy.

It just explores a lot of, a lot of nature and a lot of things that we maybe miss but should possibly pay more attention to.

I realize this isn't an elevator pitch at all.

This is now an essay.

[laughs]

No, no, no, no. It's, it's, it's so fine.

It's so fine.

Um-

We're in a very tall building.

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

[laughs]

[laughs]

And, uh, so because he's Death, he is quite lonely because he doesn't wanna make thr- friends because he's, you know, he's gonna watch every single person in the world die, so he doesn't wanna make friends.

But then against his better judgment, he slowly meets this little family who live across the hall, a single mother called Dalia, who's a midwife, and her two young children.

And Travis just can't help himself but fall in love with this little family, and we get to see how it evolves from there as he sort of introduces himself-