The Celebrants Summary
Steven Rowley

The Celebrants Overview

A dramedy suffused with some intense tragic emotion, Steven Rowley's The Celebrants is a touching and funny third-person account of a group of five friends, who meet in college, are bound together by the death of a mutual friend, and periodically meet up to hold "funerals" for their other friends while they are still alive to make sure nothing is left unsaid. Spanning several decades, the novel picks up at each friend's "funeral" and is connected by one of the friends' terminal cancer diagnosis. Among others, Rowley tackles themes of the consequences of our actions, grief, and living with not much time left.