The Extra Large Medium - Softcover

Helen Slavin is the author of The Extra Large Medium. She was born in Lancashire in 1966 and, after the University of Warwick, she had a variety of jobs as a temporary secretary before moving to Wiltshire. There, she got married and had a son and a daughter. She has written for radio and television, including scripts for The House of Eliott and the BBC Sunday night family drama, Down to Earth.

Annie Colville sees dead people, and in British television and scriptwriter Slavin's debut, the dead wear chocolate brown while inhabiting the "Waiting Room of Heaven World," which overlaps with the everyday "Living Room World" that the rest of us see. The ghosts reach out to Annie to enlist her in tidying up unfinished—and mundane as often as unconventional—business: which niece should get the Wedgwood teapot, which romantic path a lesbian daughter should follow. Annie also has problems of her own: her husband, Evan Bees, disappeared seven years ago, and though he's assumed dead, Annie hasn't seen him among the cocoa-clad (the countdown to when Annie can have him declared legally dead provides the book's time line); her quest to discover which of her mother's many lovers is her father is leaden with disappointment; and some ghosts prove to be more haunting than others. Annie endears herself to the reader, in part because her gift exhausts her more than it elevates her, and also because she embodies a genuine purity of heart that, in lesser hands, would be cloying. (May)
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