A darkly comic insider's view of the morbidly fascinating cemetery industry.

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Prize, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the City of Toronto Book Prize

A university student during the hazy summer of 1969, Charles Wilkins took a job as a gravedigger in a vast corporate cemetery in the east end of Toronto. The bizarre-but-true events of that time—a midsummer gravediggers' strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal bone-shifting—play out among a Barnum-esque parade of mavericks and misfits in this macabre and hilarious memoir.

With relentless gallows humor, In the Land of Long Fingernails is a story of mortality, materialism, friendship, and sexuality—and the gradual coming-of-age of an impressionable young man.

"If Raymond Chandler had written a memoir, I could imagine it reading like this." —Mary Roach, New York Times–bestselling author of Stiff