Set for Life Author:Judith Freeman On the strength of her widely praised short story collection, "Family Attractions", and her luminous first novel, "The Chinchilla Farm", Judith Freeman has swiftly emerged as one of the strongest and most individual new voices in American fiction. Now, in "Set for Life", she gives us a marvelous, touching new novel that explores--with boldness, ... more »delicacy, and rare insight--the mysteries of love and healing as they play out in the lives of two "ordinary" Americans in extraordinary circumstances.
One of them is Phil Doucet, a retired carpenter in Idaho, a widower, a dreamer, and a man who will die if he does not soon find a new heart. That heart becomes available from a startling source--and Phil, now the possessor of a perfectly functioning new organ, is, physically, "set for life." Emotionally, his survival is far less certain, as Phil struggles to balance a fiercely complex (and intimate) moral equation of sacrifice and loss.« less