"This is a page-turner that begins with a magical premise—a mind born new right at the moment of a body’s death. We begin with death and move backward through a life, as seen through the ‘eyes’ of this new mind, and we track the actions of the character’s body through everything it did before it died. This is curious enough, but the mind telling the story understands the world backward, as if on ‘rewind.’ Does this make any sense? It does in Amis’s hands and has a bizarrely profound impact."

"A book about mountains, loss, death, life, living Zen and everything else in between. Living on a mountain myself, Peter reminds me that the mountains and stones are alive. Friends that I speak to daily. Peter Matthiessen, together with Gary Snyder, Arne Naess and John Cage are my teachers on how to grow older. With vigor, elegance and spark."

"I’ve never gone through a phase of music that I’m embarrassed about in later life, but I overplayed this song so can’t stand it anymore. I played the whole of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’ to death when I was in my mid-teens, so despite this being an incredible song, it’s not something I reach for now"

"“Of shapes transformed to bodies strange” — Ovid’s theme is Shakespeare in a nutshell. As a theater fanatic, I discovered Ovid in my 40s when I wrote my PhD thesis on Renaissance Tragicomedy. For me, the root of drama and language is the invisible made visible in the shape-changing of sex, love, life and death. Not to mention food."