The subjects Ann Packer tackles in Some Bright Nowhere are no easy feat. At its core, we have: a 40-year marriage, one with grown children and bundles of repressed emotions carried forth into characters Eliot and Claire’s adulthoods. Even more so at its core: we have love and deep understanding, it is clear from the first page. But, another thing is clear from the first page: this novel is about the end of life. Claire has just gone into hospice.
We follow Eliot’s perspective through the worst time in his life in the most personal of ways: the mundane tasks he must still do each day, the dishes that must be done, the medications organized, the cooking and baking he loses himself in for relief. Eliot tries to remain stable, he tries to be good at this. He needs to be good at this.
And, from our perspective, he is good at this, wonderful at this in fact. He is doting and he is immensely devoted to Claire. He anticipates her every need, sensing oncoming headaches minutes before she actually feels them. Through his care, we become deeply connected to Eliot as the reader. We are treading water right there next to him, trying to keep our heads above water.
Until, in one fell swoop, Claire declares her dying wish. With this, alongside Eliot, our heads are shoved underwater. We are unable to breathe.
We never get the chance to delve into Claire’s head, and while this could be frustrating at times as the reader, as the one moving through this world with Eliot, I think this omission unearths all of the psychological questions Packer means to pose: how could we possibly understand what’s going through Claire’s head? Someone who knows she has months to live? We can’t. No one can. And we don’t get to. It would never be the full picture.
And so Eliot, heart shattered, as her final request is in exact opposition to everything he’s tenuously built this house of cards around, obeys. How could Eliot possibly deny the love of his life her last wish? But, how on Earth could this be her wish?
To reveal her wish would spoil the crux of the novel so I will only say that her wish left me reeling. I did not begin to understand parts of her wish until later in the novel, where Packer slowly peels back the layers of the depth of their bond exposing a few dark abscesses of miscommunication, of unsolved wounds.
We see Eliot feel every feeling of this diagnosis, confronting the loss of his wife, the way grief strikes you like a train at the most random moments, leaving Eliot clinging to a parking meter, leaving him sobbing behind the wheel after errands. It is not until the latter half of the novel that we realize that Claire hasn’t seen the feelings we’ve seen—he’s kept them private. He cries in solitude. He doesn’t want to burden her more.
But has hiding his feelings left Claire to feel hers alone? As the novel progresses, through flashbacks into their years before Claire’s diagnosis, we gain insight into how deeply connected they are in many ways and how they emotionally diverge in others. It feels as though Claire is tired of feeling misunderstood, but doesn’t have the energy or the time during her end of life to try to explain it any more. And who are we to argue?
It is intentional that I do not use words like battle with cancer, because the novel so beautifully debunks the language we use to mystify and lighten what it is, to wrap a doily around an ugly thing and hope we just might not notice. Claire, discerning despite her condition, graceful yet assertive, does not subscribe to society’s way of being a cancer patient. She refuses to call it a battle. It is not a moral shortcoming or an act of failure on the patient to “win” or “not win” against cancer; hospice is not the product of someone not fighting hard enough. But what to call it? What language could possibly be used to describe all they are enduring? No language is enough.
Still, she does not want to be controlled by flowery metaphors nor does she want to feel constrained by shoulds. Should be three to six months, two to four months, weeks to days, the ever changing line in the sand, trying to provide loved ones with any semblance of control. Eliot’s anxiety desperately clings to these as the law, and how could it not. Packer beautifully juxtaposes the emotionality of the dying and the assistant of the dying, the assistant being Eliot, feeling the only way to make himself useful is through administrative tasks. Someone has to do them, they are essential, but Claire needs someone crying with her more than she needs someone crying about her, more than she needs the perfectly baked blueberry scone.
Thus, emotional support and what it means during the end of life is something that Packer tackles so brilliantly in this novel that it knocked the wind out of me. You are rocked back and forth on the waves of this storm, one moment feeling for Eliot, feeling angry with Claire for her wishes, but then seeing Eliot’s blindspots and Claire’s exhaustion with them and therefore how alienated she feels.
This alienation is valid, her perspective makes sense, and yet the way she responds to this alienation hurts him profoundly. Who was right? Who hurt who more? Some Bright Nowhere forces you to keep score and then learn to erase the tallies you wrote. There is no number that matters, no playing field to even.
This novel will mean something to everyone, and for many it will mean so much it will be hard to look directly at. No matter to what degree it means to you, it will hold it up to the light, let whoever comes to mind when reading this live in your current Thursday when maybe it felt safer not to confront it that day. But it is also the first time you’re learning about Eliot and Claire. Packer beautifully weaves the things we have all gone through in some capacity, the generational patterns that make us who we are, that make us anxious or defensive or to what degree we handle hard things, while also painting a unique picture of this couple. Because there is no right way to be a patient and there is no right way to be a caretaker. There is no one road to take. There is no right way to feel and no right timeline of when you’re going to feel it. There is no being good at this or bad at this. There is only being human, every edge of it, with no shortcuts and with so much love and light that all we can do is learn to look it in the eye.
FICTION
Some Bright Nowhere
By Ann Packer
Harper
Published on November 11, 2025
