Joseph Monninger (Burkina Faso) — GOODBYE TO CLOCKS TICKING

Goodbye to Clocks Ticking
By Joseph Monninger (Burkina Faso 1975–77)
Steerforth Publishing
March. 2023
208 pages
$9.99 (Kindle); $16.99 (Hardcover), (Audiobook)

An uplifting journey of truly seeing and appreciating what makes life worth living in the year following a terminal diagnosis

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Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is an unforgettable book that tells the story of a singular year of challenges, insights, and peculiar gifts. It is also a sort of postcard from a place many of us will one day visit.

After thirty-two years of teaching, Joe Monninger, an avid outdoorsman in robust health, was looking forward to a long retirement with the love of his life in a cabin beside a New England estuary. Three days after his last class, however, he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, even though he has not smoked for more than 30 years. It was May, and he might be dead by early fall.

Soon Joe learned, however, that he was a genetic match for treatment with a drug that could not cure his cancer, but could prolong his life. With this temporary reprieve, he sets out to live life to the fullest and to write about the year of grace that follows, from his cancer treatments to his innermost thoughts.

Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is a work of wisdom and insight. Joe Monninger’s aubade to the world that he knew and loved offers a page-turning, suspenseful story to relish and to celebrate, to share and to discuss, to ponder and to learn from.

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Joseph Monninger (Burkina Faso 1975–77) published several award-winning YA novels and three books of nonfiction, including the memoir Home Waters, and has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He is the winner of Peace Corps Worldwide 2021 Short Stories Award for Baby. He lives and teaches in New Hampshire, where he also runs a dog sled team.