With the quiet precision of Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roachs Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her fathers mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town. "The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . "Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her fathers mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subjects life. Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that Petroleum is crumbling awaya process that began twenty years ago when an accident in the grain elevator killed a beloved high school athlete. The mill closed for good, the train no longer stopped in town, and Robert Golden, the victims younger brother, was widely blamed for the tragedy and shipped off to live elsewhere. Now, out of the blue, Robert has returned to care for his terminally ill mother. After Maryreserved, introspective, and deeply lonelystrikes up an unlikely friendship with him, shocking the locals, she finally begins to consider what might happen if she dared to leave Petroleum. Set in Americas heartland, The Flicker of Old Dreams explores themes of resilience, redemption, and loyalty in prose as lyrical as it is powerful.