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AA-S Best Bet: Austin author Joe O'Connell's first novel, "Evacuation Plan," sets out to honor the dying — and those who care for them — in the setting of hospice. "(You) know the difference between death and an electric eel?" observes one of the characters in the book. "People aren't afraid to talk about electric eels!" O'Connell was inspired to write "Evacuation Plan" after a three-month stint as a volunteer at Hospice Austin. His novel, crafted in the style of Tim O'Brien's recent novel "July, July," is a collection of reminiscence — tales alternately gentle, dramatic, surrealistic, that collectively affirm the beauty of being alive, even as they acknowledge that all of us face the necessity of making our own "evacuation plan."

"The message of hospice is more important than my book," says O'Connell, who is donating a portion of sales to Hospice Austin. "And that message is that you can have dignity and control over the end of your existence, that chance to say goodbye on your own terms. Who can ask for more than that?"

In celebration of "Evacuation Plan," BookPeople is staging a dramatic reading tonight that features Austin actors Chris Sykes, Amparo Garcia-Crow and Gary Kent. They will speak in the first-person voices of the novel's characters. Austin writer and rocker Jesse Sublett will play music that honors the novel's themes. What we have here is a home-grown Austin writer, and not your traditional book signing.
— Brad Buchholz

From the promoter:
An Austin Chronicle Summer Reading pick, Joe O'Connell's novel-in-stories style Evacuation Plan, a novel from the hospice, is filled with rich characters who reveal themselves in poignantly unfolding stories: the gambler who plays a risky game of sexual chicken involving his wife and his ex-con father; the mortician who was an unwed father-to-be; the drunk who magically encounters himself as a boy. Forgiveness, joy, making the final leap. Evacuation Plan is the story of a world in which the clock ticks off the final moments for all of us and makes of those moments a lifetime. Tonight at 7pm.