THE ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LENNI AND MARGOT

Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson is terminally ill, a long-term, motherless patient rarely visited by her father. But in her final months, she gathers a new family of quirky characters who inhabit Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital.

As the days drift by on May Ward (the sad name for the hospital wing housing the medically hopeless cases), Lenni seeks something to fill her time. One day, she decides to visit the chapel even though she is not particularly spiritual and her religious training is haphazard at best—biblical parables have gotten tangled up with fairy tales and worries about homelessness. Yet there she meets Father Arthur, her first soul mate. Just months away from retirement, the priest finds in Lenni a witty, playful friend. She’s just as likely to good-naturedly mock his vestments as to ask him why she is dying. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the hospital, a young office temp is trying to use her art degree to snag a full-time job. Although her work backfires a bit when she loses her job to a proper teacher, the art therapy program she creates introduces Lenni to Margot. An 83-year-old woman awaiting her own death, Margot instantly clicks with Lenni. Recognizing that their ages add up to 100, Lenni and Margot embark on a massive project: 100 works of art to represent their entire century of life. Well, it’s mostly Margot’s art, because she’s a wonderful artist, and Lenni’s stories, because she’s a terrible artist. Threading together these two lives, Cronin not only embellishes Lenni’s brief sojourn with Margot’s dramatic adventures, but also nimbly avoids drifting into sentimental clichés. So as Lenni’s health declines, Margot’s stories chase her true love through a broken marriage, criminal escapades, unexpected liaisons, and even a lost chicken story.

A whimsical, joyous portrait of the ends of things.