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| | | | | Category Full 1 | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs |
| | Category Full 2 | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures |
| | Category Full 3 | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Death & Dying |
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| | |  | About the BookOther FormatsProduct Images | “A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings” (O, The Oprah Magazine)—the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living.
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| | Andrew Meredith’s father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It’s a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence—falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a “remover,” the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man.
Called “artful” and “compelling” by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredith’s poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and “he tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicle” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “Potent” (Publishers Weekly), and “ultimately rewarding” (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with “lyrical language and strong sense of place” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
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| | Andrew Meredith has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He received an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro. The Removers is his first book.
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| | "A coming-of-age tale laden with corpses and casual sex, fledging children and family ties, the stoop and strain, the heft and haulage of life's dead weights... Mr. Meredith knows how to make sentences... The reader is edged, inevitably, up and back between the good laugh and good cry by his artful prose....Compelling… It turns out that, by getting the dead where they need to go, the living can get where they need to be.”
— Thomas Lynch, Wall Street Journal
“Flawless… With a mordant sense of humor and poet's eye for detail, [Meredith] puts us square in the middle of his story... Rollicking fun.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
"Powerful...Meredith writes with plainspoken grace and easy humor... Meredith meditates on failure and family with an honesty so raw it’s almost painful. What makes this memoir ultimately rewarding is its steadfast testimony of Meredith’s progress toward becoming the kind of man he wants to be. "
— Boston Globe
"A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings."
— O Magazine
"[Father and son] delivering bodies of the recently dead to a mortician... That is the substrate of this memoir, and also its ruling metaphor: the image of the death of the family. Piercingly, it is also the avenue, via skin and smell and mortality, to the book’s ecstatic conclusion."
— The New Yorker
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