This is Claire’s last summer. Pushing past her regrets and grief, she decides to travel to Italy to paint, to revel in the sun and wine and sea and colors before she ends her own life, on her own terms. A Handful of Earth follows terminally ill Claire as she reunites with a lover, reconnects with an old friend, and falls back in love with Italy, all while coming to terms with the relationship between body and environment and the damage that has been inflicted upon her by the same earth she loves so deeply. A Handful of Earth is a lyrical novel and eco-lament whose bright and rhythmic sweeping prose feels like sand slipping through your fingers, leaving you ready to start all over again.

<>

Tomorrow I’ll wake to a new world, to the old world. Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, I’ll wake. But not everyday. Soon I’ll do what I’ve come to do. It’s calling me.

To kill: to deprive of life in any manner, to destroy, to do away with, to extinguish. To overcome completely or with irresistible effect.

Wine, sunlight, song. Irresistible effect.

It’s calling me.