Rachel, a librarian in Brooklyn, hasn’t had the best luck with men. “I’d dated inadvisably before,” she admits, “the long-distance architect, the married whiskey distiller, the homeless freegan.” But when she sees a beautiful young man lingering at her bus stop, she’s hopeful he might be the one to reverse her string of bad luck. Thomas, it turns out, is her perfect match — or he would be, if only he weren’t dead. That’s the setup for The Regrets , the dazzling debut novel from Georgia author Amy Bonnaffons. Wildly inventive and daring, her novel is a reflection on the limits of love that’s both hilarious and heartbreaking. The novel opens with Thomas encountering an angel after he and his best friend are killed in a motorcycle accident. It turns out he’s met the angel before, as a child, when she visited him in the mistaken belief that he was about to die. Because of that meeting, a mysterious man in an otherworldly office tells Thomas that he’s “insufficiently dead … You lack
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