Alice Seybold’s novel The Lovely Bones is narrated by the spirit of a girl who has been murdered and who watches her family and her friends as their lives unfold without her. This passage captures the essence of the idea that informs the novel I am working on, called Perpetual Light:
Ruth . . . wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.
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