"The unnamed narrator of The Gifts of the Body is a home-care worker who assists people with AIDS. From Rick to Mrs. Lindstrom to Marty and Carlos and back again, she takes us on her rounds, telling us their stories as she cooks their meals, cleans their houses, does their laundry, helps them bathe - that is, she does what she can, in the end all there is to do, becoming their companion in the everyday gestures that sustain life in the face of death." ""All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them," Isak Dinesen said. Rebecca Brown has written a brave, true story about dying and death, in language so spare and direct that you don't notice its power until your stomach knots and your eyes fill with tears. Her narrator is a person driven by the need to honor the people she cares for, in all their dignity, all their frailty, all their humanity. She is a person who knows what it is like to watch someone you love die. And in that knowing, in its perfect rendering on the page, is release - the gift of mourning, the gift of bearing the deepest and most final sorrow."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

An emotionally wrenching work of fiction about a health-care worker who tenders compassion and love to victims of AIDS, by an author who "strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need."--New York Times Book Review