The Passion for Life

For this one I need twenty stars! It is so deep, so heartfelt. It left me breathing deeply in the end, wondering how normal life could go on around me after this story.

What would you do if you were given only a few months to a year to live? Just at the cusp of a promising career, in the prime of early manhood?

Frank Erskine is diagnosed with a fatal internal ailment in 1914 and given one year to live by the greatest doctor in England. He leaves his practice of law and goes to Cornwall to find peace before death. He would like to believe in God, for he hates to think of simply ceasing to exist after death; he loves life and wants more of it. However, he is horrified at the apathy he sees in the two local churches—one a Church of England cathedral, the other a Free Methodist chapel. The locals assure him that their beliefs used to be visible, but he's not seeing any of it.

He hears plenty of tales about the man who built the cottage on the cliff where he is spending his last days, a hermit named Father Abraham whose disappeared one day, leaving a bloody wreck in the cottage, so that the locals are quite sure he was robbed by a tramp and his body thrown over the cliff into the sea.

Frank begins to see interesting, inexplicable phenomenons along the shoreline. He finds no solid evidence, no footsteps left behind where he is sure he saw people. The community believes that stretch of shoreline haunted; but what if it's actually German spies? But what could they possibly want on this remote Cornish shore?

I especially loved Simpson and Hugh Lethbridge and Squire Treherne and Josiah Lethbridge and Isabella ... I was upset about something that happened with Hugh, with him being a top favorite character, but Hocking is so talented that I became resigned by the end. I was, honestly, so absorbed by the tale that the author could have gone pretty far and still left me content. It's impossible not to keep flipping the pages as Frank searches for the meaning of life and learns to face death. Highly recommended!

*No swears, no sex, very little violence

*An afterlife/visionary scene near the end of the book

Free ebook on Project Gutenburg