Winner of the National Book Award, Afterlife remains one of the clearest firsthand accounts of queer life, care, and mourning during the late twentieth century — and one of the few that never turns suffering into abstraction.

Afterlife is Paul Monette’s memoir of love, illness, and grief in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. Written after the death of his partner, Roger Horwitz, it is a record of what it meant to love someone through a terminal illness at a time when public indifference was the norm.

Love, and rage.