Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose lives have gone in very different directions. Grace is a private school teacher from Fairfield County, Brian an adventure travel executive in Seattle. Grace nearly won a Rhodes Scholarship at Princeton and was a PhD candidate at Yale when an unexpected pregnancy threw her plans into a tailspin. Brian barely scraped through an obscure New England college and recently married Ella, a lively, pot-smoking realtor, after three years in an intimate relationship with a charismatic man from Jamaica.

When their mother Cinny, a widowed charter member of Woodstock Nation, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s, she opts for an early exit from life and stops eating. Grace and Brian are there for her last days in hospice care, where they learn Cinny has plans for them after she’s gone. They’re to take her ashes, mixed with their father’s, and sprinkle them at exotic locations around the globe—some remote, some challengingly public, all known and loved by the Poseys.

Joined by Grace’s husband Jack, a “recovering good ol’ boy” lawyer from Clearwater,  their daughter Chelsea, recently moved in with a widower twenty years her senior, Ella, and Ella’s daughter Sage, a self-described “sixteen-year-old nihilistic feminist socialist,” Grace and Brian set off around the globe on a funereal odyssey that teaches them more about their parents’ relationship and about themselves than they find it easy to accept.

By turns hilarious, profound, jarring, and poignant, Pocketful of Poseys bounds dizzily through New Zealand, Thailand, Italy, Switzerland, and England before pulling off at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike, as the last of Cinny Posey’s secrets are revealed and her survivors confront the strength of the ties that bind them all together—for worse and for better.  

About the Author: 

Thomas Reed taught literature, film, and writing at Dickinson College for thirty years. His first novel, Seeking Hyde, grew out of courses he taught on Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated novel and was named Finalist in the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction. Pocketful of Poseys draws more broadly on his experience growing up in an academic family; his education at Yale, the University of Virginia, and Oxford; years spent living in Rome and Christchurch, N.Z.; circum-global travels with his wife and children, and courageous decisions made by his motherin-law as she faced her death. He and his wife Dottie now split their year between Sarasota, Florida, and Camp Pemigewassett, a summer camp for boys in New Hampshire that they co-own. Learn more at thomasreedauthor.com.