The World’s Room explores one family’s experiences with grief. When Erich, the 17-year-old son of Willy and Lorna Hoffman, commits suicide in 1969, his younger brother asks to serve his memory by taking on his dead brother’s name. Told two decades later by the surviving Erich, the book, written in memoir style, is the true story of that renaming, and of how the love for the missing can replace the love for the living. Covering ground from New York to Venice Beach, from central Wisconsin to central Mexico, from Boston to Miami, The World’s Room is at once interior and sweeping.