As I Lay Dying. A Family Hauls Their Mother's Coffin Across the County Because She Asked Them To — And Everyone Has a Reason to Regret It

When Addie Bundren dies, she leaves her family one last order: bury me in Jefferson, forty miles away, not here. What should be a simple errand turns into a grueling, increasingly disastrous journey - flooded rivers, a broken leg set in cement, a barn fire - while each family member narrates their own private version of grief, guilt, and self-interest. Faulkner tells the whole story through fifteen shifting first-person voices, none of them fully reliable, building one of modernism's most daring structural experiments into something that's also, underneath the technique, a brutally honest portrait of a family that never really knew how to love each other.