In its quiet way, “Life After Life,” McCorkle’s sixth novel, is a daring venture — an attempt to tell a big story inside a tiny orbit. At the Pine Haven retirement center in the author’s familiar, fictional Fulton, N.C., dinner is finished early, which is fine with sunny Sadie, “who likes to watch ‘Jeopardy’ in her pajamas.” Other occupants are less delighted with the place: crusty Toby, a retired schoolteacher, repairs to her room, “haunted by little past moments,” and Rachel, once a lawyer up North, sniffs at Southern manners and sweet tea, succumbing to “a wave of time sickness” for her former life.

The prospect of spending hours among these people might seem tedious to a reader not having to bunk at Pine Haven himself (“Who in the hell wants dinner at 5:30?” as feisty Rachel complains), but McCorkle is a poet of the everyday.

The book — released a week before Kate Atkinson's novel of the same title — revolves around characters linked in different ways to Pine Haven, a retirement center in Fulton, N.C. Chapters alternate between bits of narrative and short pieces about various characters' deaths written from two points of view — that of a hospice volunteer and that of the deceased.

As grim and morbid as this sounds, it's not. McCorkle's writing is tender and warm and funny, not sad.

Amid a literary landscape increasingly rife with metafictional and postmodern high jinks, Jill McCorkle's sixth novel, Life After Life, is as resolutely down to earth and unpretentious as the hot-dog franchise owned by one of her characters.

If parts of the novel read like a needlepoint sampler, other parts read like needlepoint graffiti.