Heaven Is Small — Emily Schultz

Award-winning author and poet Emily Schultz offers an immensely readable, funny, and sharp novel about a man who works for a Harlequin-like publisher, and gradually discovers that he has arrived in "heaven." Like Will Ferguson's international bestseller, Happiness, Heaven is Small is a smart, satirical novel from one of our best.

Heaven is Small is the funny, layered, startling, and profound story of Gordon Small, a degree-clutching slacker and failed fiction writer. Gordon is also, we discover in the first paragraph, recently deceased - although this is "an event he failed to notice." When Gordon finds himself suddenly employed at the Heaven Book Company, the world's largest romance publisher, he begins to notice that something is odd: his routines within the company's walls, though familiar in some respects, have taken on a strange cast - stranger than is usual in the average suburban office.

With sly deadpan humour, brilliant insight into the human condition, and exceptionally beautiful writing, Schultz explores what it means to be truly alive only after you're dead.