On first reading, it seemed to me that this book was flawed, seeming to lack any action to drive the plot forward. However, I’ve previously caught myself in the error of dismissing a book because I wanted to read a different one, rather than evaluating what the author actually wrote.

So I waited until the deadline before attempting a review, and it was good that I did, because this is a book of which the power and depth only emerges after closing it and stepping away for a while.

As the story opens Kama is washing dishes in her kitchen in Detroit while expounding on politics. Then her daughter Dune notices that she has fallen silent and gone motionless, completely unresponsive. Kama has become patient zero in a newly emerged plague that strikes suddenly and leaves its victims without speech or the ability to move, and only affects Black people. At first the doctors are puzzled, but after no treatment has any effect and other victims are reported, they discharge Kama, since Dune can’t pay for life support in the hospital, telling Dune to feed her on broth and water. Kama can’t swallow and dies after two weeks.

Because no one knows the cause of the sickness, people isolate themselves. Dune researches cremation on-line and cremates Kama by herself in the back yard. Everyone who can is fleeing; a community leader who offered support for a while, Dune’s ex-lover…. She confronts grief alone, with her only remaining relative her mute Chinese grandmother.

Few people are seeking their stricken relatives, or burying those who died alone. Although a friend of her mother’s drops by regularly to help care for her grandmother, she and Dune didn’t know each other well and their communication is limited and superficial.

One day Dune goes down to her long-deceased father’s special place in the basement, where he had constructed an elaborate model of the city, to tell his ghost of her mother’s death. After she passes the first stage of grief, she begins to forage in abandoned gardens for food, and researches preserving it in her mother’s library. She also begins to note the ongoing deaths that are cited in the media, and enters the names and dates on the model city. She then starts taking notes about the sick people she encounters, recording the few repetitive words that some of them can speak, entering their names on the model.

Dune copes with her grief, and finds a sense of purpose in recognizing the lives of the lost. None of the usual supports are there—not family, friends, community, or the state. The only part of the outside world that bears on the story is its indifference. This is the essence of the story: when all a person’s connections and support have died, crumbled or fled, how do they carry on during an apocalypse? When they are to all intents and purposes essentially alone against entropy? Dune takes on the responsibility of acknowledging and recognizing the significance of every single person who died, without recognition, or support, or even hope, but doing it just the same.

Grievers is supposed to be part of a larger work, and there are hints of it—odd bits of mold in the shape of words that appear on the carved rocks of Dune’s mother, or on the model—but the author has done such a good job of depicting courage in the face of adversity without once resorting to false hope or wishful thinking that it is hard to imagine the story continuing in a way that doesn’t weaken it.