How the Dead Live by Will Self

How the Dead Live by Will Self

Will Self possesses one of the greatest literary imaginations of any writer working today. How the Dead Live is his most extraordinary book yet-a novel that will challenge, entertain, and truly astonish.

Lily Bloom is an aging American transplanted to England who has lost her battle with cancer and lies wasting away at the Royal Ear Hospital. As her two daughters--lumpy Charlotte, who runs a hugely successful chain of stationery stores called Waste of Paper, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie--buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in and out of the present, taking us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. A career girl in the 1940s, a sexed-up, tippling adulteress in the 1950s and '60s, a divorced PR flak in the 1970s and '80s, Lily presents us with a portrait of America and England over sixty years of riotous and unreal change.

And then it's over: Lily catches a cab with the aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, her guide to the shockingly banal world of the dead. It's a world that is surreal but familiar, where she again works in PR and rediscovers how great smoking is, where her cohabitants include Rude Boy, the son who died at age nine and now swears a blue streak, and three eyeless, murmuring wraiths, the Fats--composed of the pounds, literally the whole selves, she lost and gained over her lifetime. As Lily settles into her nonexistence, the most difficult challenge for this staunchly difficult woman is how to understand that she's dead, and how to leave the rest behind.

How the Dead Live is an unforgettable portrait of the human condition, the struggle with life and with death. It's a novel that will disturb and provoke, the work, in the words of one British reviewer, of a novelist writing at the height of his powers.

Self, Will: - Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; The Book of Dave; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in South London.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780802116710
ISBN 10	080211671X
Title	How the Dead Live
Author	Will Self
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Grove/Atlantic
Year published	2000-09-13
Number of pages	416
Prizes	Short-listed for Costa Book Awards (Novel) 2000
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.