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fiction
She Wanted a Good Death — Without Her Beloved Husband by Her Side
Ann Packer’s latest novel, “Some Bright Nowhere,” explores the unexpected rupture that a terminal cancer diagnosis causes in a long and happy marriage.
Credit...Cecilia Reeve
Nov. 10, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
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SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE, by Ann Packer
“And then it was over, the final visit to Claire’s oncologist,” reads the first sentence of Ann Packer’s slyly solemn and skillfully surprising new novel, “Some Bright Nowhere.”
Claire is a woman in her 60s who’s been treated for cancer for eight years before reaching the end of all options. We watch this mi…
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fiction
She Wanted a Good Death — Without Her Beloved Husband by Her Side
Ann Packer’s latest novel, “Some Bright Nowhere,” explores the unexpected rupture that a terminal cancer diagnosis causes in a long and happy marriage.
Credit...Cecilia Reeve
Nov. 10, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE, by Ann Packer
“And then it was over, the final visit to Claire’s oncologist,” reads the first sentence of Ann Packer’s slyly solemn and skillfully surprising new novel, “Some Bright Nowhere.”
Claire is a woman in her 60s who’s been treated for cancer for eight years before reaching the end of all options. We watch this milestone through the eyes of her husband, Eliot, who has cared for her with real love. And what a bold move it really is on the author’s part, to begin a book with the insistent news of “over” and “final.” How will a story come out of this? Where can it go?
Not to any guessable places, it turns out; there are no long flashback sequences, no buried secrets revealed, no bodily breakthroughs. The plot depends instead on the actions of the dying patient, an intelligent and candid woman who has raised two children and once wrote half a dissertation on Katherine Anne Porter.
When her two best friends come to visit, she reveals a last wish to have them tend to her, with their laughing, their in-jokes, their old knowledge and shared stories. She wants to orchestrate her own exit, shape it to an elevated form, and before long, she asks Eliot to move out. Which he does, in shock and sorrow.
This is the sixth of Ann Packer’s books of fiction, and she remains best known for her wonderful 2002 novel “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” also rooted in catastrophe. In it, a young woman, engaged to her high school sweetheart, is about to leave him just as he breaks his neck and is paralyzed. Will she go or stay? The answer is (inventively) complicated.
The suspense in “Some Bright Nowhere” rests chiefly on Claire and what she will do next. She feels as unknown to us as she is, suddenly, to Eliot, her partner of more than three decades, though he continues to visit daily and carry on most of the longstanding tasks of her care. We do recognize the real power of her requests, but are they limitless?
The couple’s grown son peevishly refers to his father as a “benign blob.” Hostilities are uttered by both wife and husband, but these are fairly moderate and are nothing new to either of them. The drama we’re in isn’t about a troubled marriage, not exactly, though Claire is not above a kind of righteous trickery. She keeps escalating her moves away from Eliot, and the reader waits for any shifts in his compliance.
Friendship versus married love is a conflict with its own force — one held in higher regard in our times than it was in the past — but Packer’s novel is less about that than it seems. Claire has pointedly set up this opposition, creating awkwardness more often than an actual battle, since both sides are working as hard as they can just to be devoted to her.
“Could you really say dying required help?” Eliot speculates early on. It’s a social process for Claire, above all; her primary concern is the company around her. She does say that she’s “unagnostically agnostic”: No talk of spiritual matters enters her plaints. She loves the prosiness of the here-and-now — she’s been a great observer, a great hostess, a great talker.
To some readers, agnosticism will have the ring of a term from another era, when one did or didn’t believe in God, before the influence of world religions made “spiritual” a broader, more encompassing category. Eliot does read a modern poem about the afterlife, from which the book takes its lovely title. (Since the poet is unidentified, we can only assume the words are Packer’s.)
Claire has an ongoing and confused desperation about what she wants. Should she run off to the Maine of beloved summers past? Or does she just long to nestle into her tasteful Connecticut home? And is her husband standing in the way of some final authenticity?
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The fitfulness of her decisions is wound around Eliot, once a traditional breadwinner and now a deft caretaker. Throughout the book, she thanks him for all he does and declares how lucky she is to have him. She says these things repeatedly. Of course, the dying are not sensible, any more than the rest of us; Claire is never anything but convincingly drawn, even in her mammoth self-forgiveness.
From the book’s opening pages when she intones, “God, I don’t want to do this,” up through her later intrigues, Eliot, who thought all major life decisions were behind him, is faced with how to behave. What was straightforward, if arduous, is now a continuing conundrum. He does what he can — he defends Claire’s choices to their dismayed kids, he visits a friend in California who understands nothing, he hikes, he spies, he resists.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the ravages of the AIDS epidemic gave us many seasons of books about death, from writers all too close to it. AIDS had a social meaning that cancer doesn’t carry, but “social” in a private sense is Claire’s one obsession: Her burning question is what other humans she wants with her at the end.
And like some patients in the AIDS years, she has time to plan. Her ideal model is a friend with breast cancer named Susan who somehow managed her own passing beautifully, surrounded by a circle “full of female energy, chatter, tears, laughter.” Following her visits to Susan’s deathbed, Claire would return somehow “full of a deeply satisfied contentment that Eliot could never square with the impending loss of her friend.”
He never witnesses those exalted scenes. The story profits from having its point-of-view character in the dark, so to speak, rather than seeing everything through the mind of the existentially petulant Claire. We stay in the mystery of this couple, with its shades and shifts. And in the final pages, with their small, quiet turns, we have the readerly satisfaction of a good ending, that elusive and beckoning goal.
SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE | By Ann Packer | Harper | 256 pp. | $28.99
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