POCKETFUL OF POSEYS

When your dying mother has one last request, how can you say no?

Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose lives have gone in very different directions. Grace, now a private school teacher in coastal Connecticut, was a PhD candidate at Yale when an unexpected pregnancy threw her plans into a tailspin. Brian, an adventure travel executive in Seattle, barely scraped through an obscure New England college and recently married Ella, after three years in an intimate relationship with a charismatic man from Jamaica. When their widowed mother Cinny, a charter member of Woodstock Nation, is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, Grace and Brian are there for her last days in hospice care. This is where Cinny reveals her staggering plan for the siblings: They're to sprinkle her ashes, mixed with their father's, at a series of exotic locations around the globe - some remote, some challengingly public, all known and loved by the Poseys. Joined by their own immediate families, Grace and Brian set off on a funereal odyssey that uncovers more about their parents' relationship, and themselves, than the twins find it easy to admit. By turns hilarious, profound, jarring, and poignant, Pocketful of Poseys bounds dizzily across the United States to New Zealand, Thailand, Italy, and more, as the last of Cinny Posey's secrets are exposed, and her survivors are forced to confront the strength of the ties that bind them all together - for worse and for better. Thomas Reed taught literature, film, and writing at Dickinson College for thirty years. His first novel, Seeking Hyde, grew out of courses he taught on Robert Louis Stevenson's celebrated novel and was named Finalist in the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction. Pocketful of Poseys draws more broadly on his experience growing up in an academic family; his education at Yale, the University of Virginia, and Oxford; years spent living in Rome and Christchurch, N.Z.; circum-global travels with his wife and children; and courageous decisions made by his mother-in-law as she faced her death. He and wife Dottie now split their year between Sarasota, Florida, and Camp Pemigewassett, a summer camp for boys in New Hampshire.