The Beautiful Farewell

By J. S. Kross

The man selling Martim his brother's coffin had the tan of someone who did well out of winter.
Martim prices death for a living. He is an actuary in Lisbon, fluent in mortality tables - until the phone rings during a meeting and his brother becomes a statistic he cannot file. Tom s, a piano tuner, has died on a staircase in Vienna, leaving behind three mismatched plates, a telescope aimed at a bakery door, a bottle of champagne provisioned for a visit no one ever scheduled - and a ledger with a column that has no heading.
In the city that invented the beautiful farewell - where grief is invoiced by the millimetre, the funeral doves are professionals who fly home for dinner, and there is a museum for the whole business - Martim must dismantle his brother's life one object at a time. What he finds is not absence. It is a noisy, ridiculous, unpayable inheritance: a neighbour who bakes like an airlift, a waiter whose condolences arrive as a glass of water, a Czech cellist whose C string was tuned flat on purpose, and the slow discovery that his silent brother had been paying attention to everyone.
The Beautiful Farewell is a novel about the industry of death and the maintenance of love - funny where it should be solemn, precise where it should collapse, and hopeful without ever once saying so.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8QRK3VL
• ISBN13: 9798187139736
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"