From the stack of books that accompanied us to Corsica not long ago, one stood out: Annie Dillard’s novel The Living.

Years ago I saw a pair of Annie Dillard’s books on display in a used-book store window, and picked one up to browse through. Teaching A Stone To Talk is a collection of short essays, many of them based on her keen-eyed observation of the natural world, which she writes about with the skill of a poet, and with the passions of both amateur philosopher and theologian. Standing there, browsing: the first essay — “Living Like Weasels”; the first pages of it; and her vivid image of the eagle with the weasel “still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant”… the attraction was immediate.

Since then I have read every book of hers, and The Living — her first novel — has been on my shelf since if was first published in 1992. Why, then, did take me so long to get to?

In part, because I wanted to savour it, to take my time; and in part because I wasn’t sure how she — a writer of impeccable non-fiction, and of poetry — would manage the craft of fiction. I needn’t have worried.

An excerpt from it:

Accidents happened, and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick. […] Broken legs and arms were common enough, but if any bone poked through skin, another singular spirit departed this earth in a month or two, just from that bone’s catching the death in the air, which it was not used to, and carrying it back deep into the body.

All deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just so random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age. “Wherever the body was, there would eagles gather”. Women took fever and died from having babies, and babies from puniness or the harshness of the air. Men died from trafficking in superior forces, like rivers and horses, bulls, steam saws, mill gears, quarried rock, or falling trees or rolling logs. Women died in rivers, too, and fevers took men. Children lost their lives as other people did, as a consequence of their bodies material fragility; hard things smashed them, like trees and the ground when horses threw them, or they fell; they drowned in water; they sickened, and earaches wormed into their brains or fever from measles burned them up or pneumonia eased them out overnight. It was all the same and predictable, except in detail, whether a heart collapsed and seized in an old woman, or a runaway buggy crushed a growing boy: the people took the boy’s death harder, for they longed to have him with them longer, and to see him grown and fruitful. They were not ready for him to die, but they knew for a fact that death was ready. Death was ready to take people, of any size, always; and so was the broad earth ready to receive them. A child’s death was a heartbreak — but it was no outrage, no freak, nothing not in the contract, and not really early, just soon.

I defy you to improve upon that passage…