review
Tony Soprano Doesn’t Die is the story of a young woman coping with her father’s accident and subsequent coma. Antonia Baum produces a highly original take on a classic tale about the bonds between parents and children.
At the opening of the novel the narrator is about to publish her second book, the story of three siblings who worry about their father – a man fond of taking unnecessary and dangerous risks. Then her real father, a man fond of taking unnecessary and dangerous risks, has a motorcycle accident. During the next five months, while her father remains in a coma, the author travels every Friday to visit her father in hospital. The book is made up of a collection of small scenes, the narrator’s reflections, her childhood memories of her father, her compulsion to write and the stories she creates as a way of controlling fate and making sense of a senseless event. In the end, her real father survives. Antonia Baum effortlessly combines high literary style with vernacular language and references to popular American culture to create a novel that has universal appeal.
All recommendations from Spring 2016