Jacob Wright has reached the end of his rope. Recently divorced, mired in a dead-end bookstore job, without children, pets, or even plants to keep him company, Jacob decides it's time to make an exit. Having failed at living, will he be any better at dying? One thing stands in his way-Death has high standards. Thus begins Jacob's journey from life to death and back again . . . and again. Along the way, he meets a woman who wants to save his soul, a boy in search of a not-so-obscure fourteenth-century Italian poet who just might hold the key to everything, and, of course, Death himself.