After forty years together, husbands Don and Rodney are out of time. A rogue black hole is bearing down on Earth, and in a matter of weeks, everything and everyone they've ever known will be gone. So they hit the road — Maine to Washington State — to settle some unfinished business before it's all over. Along the way they find people living their final days with everything they have: impromptu weddings, bonfires, new friends, and shared meals. And as the sky fractures above them, Don and Rodney will ask if their best was ever good enough.
My Review
Thank you so much to Tor Books and Macmillan Audio for gifting me an ARC of this book.
This book absolutely wrecked me. I could not put it down. Following Don and Rodney, a gay couple in their seventies who have spent forty years loving each other through joy, loss, and survival, felt deeply intimate. When the world is literally ending thanks to a black hole hurtling toward Earth, their decision to leave Maine and drive cross-country to Washington to take care of one last promise had me hooked from the first page. This book felt like grief and love holding hands, quiet moments under a cracked moon balanced against the terrifying certainty that time is running out.
The emotional weight here is staggering. I cried more times than I can count, the ugly, breathless kind of crying, but I also smiled, laughed softly, and paused just to sit with how beautiful Klune makes ordinary human connection feel. Along the road, Don and Rodney meet people reacting to the end in wildly different ways, denial, violence, tenderness, hope, and each encounter adds another layer to the story’s ache. Their past unfolds naturally through memory, including the losses of the HIV crisis and the slow resilience it takes to keep loving anyway. There are moments of horror that made me feel genuinely scared for humanity, and moments so tender I had to stop reading just to breathe.
By the final pages, I felt hollowed out and strangely healed at the same time. This is not a fast or easy read, and it should not be. Every chapter deserves to be felt. I wanted it to be longer, not because it needed more, but because I did not want to let these characters go. This book asks what it means to love knowing loss is inevitable, and whether the life you lived was enough when the end finally arrives. It is devastating, poetic, and breathtaking, and very much in true TJ Klune fashion, it left me staring at the wall afterward, heart sore and full all at once. I loved this book as much as it hurt me, and I will be recommending it to everyone. The audiobook was also amazing. There is such depth of feeling in this story and the narrator delivered every nuance of emotion.