An old man living at the height of his powers of recall and memory tells the story of his life on the day of his death from the vantage point on a hill above the village where he was born. Quietly narrated and yet raging with will and the passion of youth, this is a novel about fathers and sons, hope and hope’s death, and how we might live in the world before leaving it. In the company of such masterpieces as Seethaler’s A Whole Life and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A wildly immersive story, The Serpent will grip the reader from the outset and is a provocative and an-putdownable study of what it is to be human.