Desperate Housewives meets Six Feet Under in this brilliantly moving and darkly comic novel, which charts the attempts of dying heroine Delia - a modern day Mrs Beeton - to prepare her family for the future and lay to rest a ghost from her past.

Delia Bennet has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides, with advice on everything from laundry to lovers.

The one thing she hasn't ever given advice on is her own situation: barely forty but dying.

To prepare her family, she tries everything from writing lists to teaching her daughters to make the perfect cup of tea. What she really needs is a household guide: the kind she is expert at writing. She sets to work.

But the writing forces Delia to confront painful ghosts from her past. there is a journey she needs to make, and one last vital thing she must do...