Available in paperback, Kindle e-book, and audiobook formats.

We’ll be discussing What You Can See from Here by Mariana Leky.

On a lovely spring morning, a small village receives a grim sign: Selma has dreamed of an okapi, which means someone is going to die.

Ten-year-old Luisa watches as the familiar people around her grandmother start behaving in unexpected ways. None of them will admit to believing in omens, yet each one is suddenly confronting long-hidden secrets and choices they've been putting off, now made pressing by the prospect of death.

Luisa's mother wrestles with whether to leave her husband. The optician, a longtime family friend who goes by no other name, works up the nerve to confess his love for Selma. Gloomy Marlies is the lone exception, carrying on as always, sulking at home and making awful meals. When the foretold death does arrive, it happens in a way nobody saw coming. The loss marks Luisa permanently and influences who she becomes, as she grows up facing life's biggest questions with a loyal circle of friends of all ages.

Mariana Leky's What You Can See from Here is a delightful, bittersweet novel about the absurdities of living and dying, about small-town life and the larger world that tempts from beyond it. It reflects thoughtfully on how love and loss shape both individuals and the communities around them, telling a touching story of grief, young love, hesitant love, love that comes late, and discovering where you belong, even when that turns out to be the place you began.

You can purchase it here or buy where ever you get books.