The Fountain (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781542733151)

The Fountain describes the ordeal of Elizabeth Holbrook, a twenty-nine-year-old elementary school teacher in Florida who gets into a car accident on her way to a dentist appointment. After the crash, she regains consciousness in a beautiful but very strange place. In many ways, the landscape is familiar. There are sidewalks and green landscape, but the surroundings look like no place she has ever seen. She is naked, but her features are not fully formed. Just as she is trying to figure out what has happened, she encounters Mason, a friend from her childhood, and shortly after that her mother.

Elizabeth realizes that she has died and that she is in the afterworld. Her mother explains that here, all people have a "place" to make their own. However, just as Elizabeth is becoming accustomed to her new surroundings, she begins to realize that something is not right. She is not dead but rather teetering between life and death. She worries that if she returns to the land of the living, she will forget everything she has experienced here. Elizabeth goes to extraordinary measures to record what she has encountered and to share what she saw and learned with the mortal world.