Eleanor Fletcher, an 18-year-old suburban Detroiter singed and sooty from gifted-kid burnout always thought she'd have more time. More time to carve out an identity separate from the expectations of others, more time to seam-rip the shadow of depression stitched into her skin, more time to give herself to men that didn't whisper their wives' name like a confession when they thought she was asleep. She thought she had more time-- until she was certain that she didn't. 

Struck dead from an aneurysm on the night of her best friend's eighteenth birthday, Eleanor awakens in the eerie quietude of the In-Between, an intermediary space between this world and the next. Here, she discovers that she must earn her passage to the next life by ferrying souls for the Empyrean, the rigid and theocratic governing body of the undead. It is at this seat of concentrated power where souls are separated into Climbers and Reapers, the former forced to scale overlapping sets of endless stairs while the latter are tasked with returning to Earth and hiding in plain sight until they are called back into service. 

After a disastrous first Reaping and start to her new half-life as a subject of the Empyrean, Eleanor unwittingly uncovers a truth that slides slick into the bedrock of the very institution that rules the afterlife with its brutal and severe punishment and reeducation system. Straddling the knife-edge of the Empyrean's tolerance for her mistake, Eleanor is forced to choose between carrying on as a reluctant but compliant Reaper and revitalizing an uprising that's hobbling along on its last legs.

The Swallowing of Stars is a brooding, delicate exploration of the notion that reality, in death is just as overly-complicated as it is in life and that above all, time is the metric least suited to distinguish between a life well lived and a death well spent.