Publication Date: July 2026

Ben Reeves has spent years guiding others through the hardest days of their lives. Since losing his wife Jo, though, he has found himself rather less capable of taking his own advice. He has her memory for company and her voice in his head, wry and exasperated and entirely unwilling to let him off the hook, but nothing that feels much like a future.

Then Helen McCrohan walks through the door of his funeral home, mourning her beloved partner with an emotional honesty that Ben finds equal parts moving and exhausting. And with Helen comes Abby, her daughter, a journalist whose composure turns out to be as carefully constructed as Ben's own.

What follows is a story about grief and guilt, about the unlikely communities that catch us when we fall, and about the tentative, tender possibility of beginning again.

The Undertaker’s Guide to Love, Loss & Other Messy Things is funny, sharp and quietly devastating.

Adam Prior has been writing since he could pick up a pencil. A working life spent building businesses and advising other people on theirs meant plenty of articles, op-eds and two successful business books, but the novel was always the destination he had in mind and never quite reached. Until now.

His debut novel, The Undertaker's Guide to Love, Loss & Other Messy Things, was finally written in the conditions that suited him best: semi-retirement, a house in Shropshire hills, and a healthy disregard for doing things the conventional way.

He writes about the people who show up uninvited and stay anyway, the friendships that form in unlikely places, and the stubborn comedy that persists even when life is being thoroughly difficult.

He has an incredibly understanding family and walks a lot, which helps.