The Young Widower’s Handbook

McAllister writes with heartfelt emotion about the sudden death of a spouse in this remarkable debut novel. Hunter Cady, an immature 29—his life filled with such attempts at self-improvement as “the Month of No Hot Dogs,” and “the Month of Being Romantic”—spends an inordinate amount of time with his wife, Kait, planning for all the wonderful trips they will someday take. He has the shock of his life when she suddenly dies because of a ruptured fallopian tube from an ectopic pregnancy that they had no knowledge of. Nearly catatonic with grief, he finally takes his wife’s’ ashes with him on the road trip they never took. Along the way readers learn about Hunter’s no-nonsense father and New Age mother. He has a comical and nearly tragic experience at a renaissance fair, and at one point he joins an older man in search of the wife who left him years ago. Hunter’s poignant realizations about what his wife meant to him, intermingled with his humorous and spot-on views of the people and places he encounters, as well as how he uses social media to grieve, bring him to the fitting conclusion that even beyond the grave, Kait helps him become the man he always wanted to be for her. (Feb.)