Hand in Hand

An aging couple, happily married for 43 years, decide to end their lives together rather than face separation in this piercing, deeply moving short novel. Employing crystalline (and deftly translated) prose, Finnish playwright and novelist Yliruusi tells a love story made more touching by the protagonists' sheer ordinariness. Anni, diagnosed as having cancer and thought to have less than six months to live, faces death gallantly. Her husband Thor, whose bad heart means he likely has only three or four more years to live himself, wants to die with Anni rather than face a lonely existence of mute grief, longing and guilt. He sneaks her out of the Helsinki hospital so that they can ``cheat death'' through a double suicide, expiring peacefully, with outward dignity, their arms around each other. Few writers have so keenly conveyed the sense that life is a ``gigantic hoax,'' which death unmasks ``as a wretched deceit by ending it forever.'' Yet this beautiful couple face the end calmly, knowing it may be ``the moving of the soul from this place to another.'' (Sept.)