It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens? WINNER OF THE 2024 URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZECO-WINNER OF THE 2022 NOVEL PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARDThis third perspective on myself is disconcerting. The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known―where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

"The third-person perspective on myself is disconcerting."

Jeff VanderMeer

"It Lasts Forever is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended."

jury of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

"It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a work of quietly detonative imagination. Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate. As the heroine wanders a shattered world, clutching a dead crow that is still muttering away, she becomes an incarnation of grief―its numbness and regrets and heartbreaks―and of the inevitability of our decline: we are what we lose. Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human."

Alexandra Kleeman

"Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands."

Kate Simpson, The Telegraph

"Soul-stirringly expansive, darkly comic and metaphysical… Our culture is obsessed with completion and conclusions, despite being in a world that never concludes or completes. By resisting endings, de Marcken’s deeply imaginative novel reflects that world―our collective story. ? ? ? ? ?"

Sabrina Orah Mark

"Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then ― with prose as elegant as it is spooked ― tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut."

Publishers Weekly

"De Marcken never loses sight of the grand themes of life, death, and decay, as the narrator riffs cleverly on the nature of her condition (‘Zombies used to be drug addicts, television watchers, videogame players. Now zombies are zombies. Consumers are consumers’). It amounts to a sharp and weighty depiction of what does and doesn’t make someone human."

Susie Mesure, The Spectator

"The prose is exquisite and the form is inventive, and there is plenty of white space between fragments of text and a handful of doodles. It’s wry and moving and very beautiful."

John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail

"It’s hard to imagine a more erudite zombie story. This is de Marcken’s central trope―and her triumph. She seizes the gut-smeared cliches of The Walking Dead and recomposes them as a philosophical odyssey. Better yet, despite her fiction’s core seriousness, its quest for the Real, her undead stumble through a Grand Guignol farce. A terrific debut."

Giada Scodellaro

"Anne de Marcken's It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is a superb and feral work, moving without hesitation through grief, through dust, and therefore through time… It is a soft rumination, a devastating ode to lateness, solitude, yearning. To the fleeting body. It is a quiet thing filled with contradictions―about movement and then stillness, or about rows upon rows of objects, planted or felled; about repetition. Are we not all planted or felled? I located myself on this crossing… A gem."

About the Author

Anne de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer living on unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, in the United States. She is the founding editor and publisher of the 3rd Thing.

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