Pocketful of Poseys - Paperback

by Thomas Reed (Author)

When your dying mother has one last request, how can you say no?

Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose lives have gone in very different directions. Grace, now a private school teacher in coastal Connecticut, was a PhD candidate at Yale when an unexpected pregnancy threw her plans into a tailspin. Brian, an adventure travel executive in Seattle, barely scraped through an obscure New England college and recently married Ella, after three years in an intimate relationship with a charismatic man from Jamaica.

When their widowed mother Cinny, a charter member of Woodstock Nation, is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, Grace and Brian are there for her last days in hospice care. This is where Cinny reveals her staggering plan for the siblings: They're to sprinkle her ashes, mixed with their father's, at a series of exotic locations around the globe--some remote, some challengingly public, all known and loved by the Poseys.

Joined by their own immediate families, Grace and Brian set off on a funereal odyssey that uncovers more about their parents' relationship, and themselves, than the twins find it easy to admit.

Author Biography

Thomas Reed has spent twenty years exploring, teaching, and writing about the life and times of Robert Louis Stevenson. His non-fiction book, The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Victorian Alcohol Debate (McFarland, 2006), examines the outsized role of Drink in Stevenson's career and culture. In the course of his research, Reed stumbled across a profound historical irony rooted in the social impact of Stevenson's famous novel. Only by stepping into the realm of fiction could he explore the strange turnings of the author's fate in a way they positively cried out for. Thomas Reed studied at Yale, the University of Virginia, and Oxford, and spent three decades teaching Victorian and medieval literature at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He recently moved to Sarasota, Florida, to take up writing full time, where he lives with his wife Dorothy and writes each day at his grandfather's antique desk. On occasional afternoons, they stroll to the local tiki bar to enjoy the sunset and raise a glass to the spirit of Stevenson.