Among the Dead and Dreaming

"Ligon handles this latticework with impressive fluidity and dramatic momentum, the disparate voices lacing the novel with the melancholy of aborted and fractured love, whether between lovers or between children and their parents. When a psychiatrist tells Mark that “the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can’t inhabit or comprehend,” we grasp that divide at the same time we question whether anyone in this world is healthy." --New York Times Book Review, Vu Tran

" Ligon is able to move between characters—the living, the dead, the barely-there, the unborn—and inhabit each voice with a pace and precision that makes the prose move, too. He begins by conducting the spare moments before a motorcycle crash through the voice of one of its pregnant victims, and in the span of three pages, orchestrates the thought-process of four other characters, including the unborn baby, Isabelle, whose solitary “Oh” delivers the single biggest understatement of the book, a caustic pause before we become submerged in a narrative of returns and remunerations, a postmodern ghost story set in New York City." —The Brooklyn Rail

"Lost love and complex human nature are at the center of this novel about recovering from the past.... Ligon's is a convincing presentation of human nature." —Foreword Reviews

"Ligon has pulled off an intricately interwoven novel that is both a gripping page-turner and also a deeply felt exploration of the most piercing kinds of pain." —New York Journal of Books

"Ligon handles this latticework with impressive fluidity and dramatic momentum, the disparate voices lacing the novel with the melancholy of aborted and fractured love, whether between lovers or between children and their parents. When a psychiatrist tells Mark that “the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can’t inhabit or comprehend,” we grasp that divide at the same time we question whether anyone in this world is healthy." --New York Times Book Review, Vu Tran

" Ligon is able to move between characters—the living, the dead, the barely-there, the unborn—and inhabit each voice with a pace and precision that makes the prose move, too. He begins by conducting the spare moments before a motorcycle crash through the voice of one of its pregnant victims, and in the span of three pages, orchestrates the thought-process of four other characters, including the unborn baby, Isabelle, whose solitary “Oh” delivers the single biggest understatement of the book, a caustic pause before we become submerged in a narrative of returns and remunerations, a postmodern ghost story set in New York City." —The Brooklyn Rail

"Lost love and complex human nature are at the center of this novel about recovering from the past.... Ligon's is a convincing presentation of human nature." —Foreword Reviews

"Ligon has pulled off an intricately interwoven novel that is both a gripping page-turner and also a deeply felt exploration of the most piercing kinds of pain." —New York Journal of Books