A small-town embalmer's daughter lifts the shroud on the fascinating minutiae of dealing with the dead. Imagine rubbing shoulders with the dead for most of your life. As she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career — from the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels to how to inject just the right amount of colour into a corpse's skin for that blushing look — the narrator must look her parents' deaths, and her relationship with them, straight in the eye. (From Coach House Books)

The Embalmer is a finalist for the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for translation. The winner will be announced on Oct. 29, 2019.